


Charlie MacNamara, Space Pirate

by Derin



Series: Charlie MacNamara, Galactic Ace [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Aliens, humanity fuck yeah, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2018-10-31 08:47:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 23
Words: 103,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10895847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: Charlie was out to get some good photos, not get abducted by aliens. But when a series of misfortunes befall the alien ship Stardancer, becoming a SPACE PIRATE might be the only way for our intrepid hero to get home!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I spent too much time on the Humanity, Fuck Yeah! reddit and this unbetaed mess happened. Enjoy.

As any decent stargazer will tell you, you can’t do it in the city. You can’t do it in a town, really, not properly. Too much light pollution. No, to properly see the stars, you have to wait for a moonless night and head out far from any electric light source and wait for your eyes to adjust and then, then you could see the majesty of the heavens.

 

I’m a stubborn person, so I had to have casual beers with three different groups of over-enthusiastic stargazers and amateur astronomers and spend quite some time on google before actually accepting the necessity of leaving the kids with Kate and driving out into the middle of Buttfuck Nowhere for my precious photographs. Now, a sensible artist would’ve just changed the focus of their piece. Or borrowed a telescope from one of those hobbyist friends and used that to make some kind of point about technology helping the appreciation of spiritual beauty or something. They might even have constructed something to block the light around the camera and give it a clear shot of the stars from within the city. But not me. No, I had to go for the pure shot. I had to be high-achieving. I had to treat a college photography project that nobody was going to give a shit about as if it were some deep statement about the purity of all art. I had to _see_ and _appreciate_ what I wanted to photograph, for some stupid reason.

 

I know, I sound bitter. I wasn’t actually this regretful when I drove out, even thought it was cold and I was bored because all my friends had found better things to do than drive with me for three hours on a Saturday night. When I was setting up my equipment, turning off everything that had any kind of light, and puzzling over what exposure times I should use for my shot series (I’ve never been much for planning in advance), I still thought this was a great idea. Hell, even packing it all away again after the twelve minutes of actual photography and huddling down in my piece-of-junk car to close my eyes for just a quick second before the drive back, I was feeling pretty good about the project.

 

The regret didn’t hit until I woke up again.

 

I woke in my car, which was unsurprising. The surprising part was that the rest of the world seemed to have vanished around it, replaced with a uniform pale yellow glow. After checking that I wasn’t dreaming and that the engine was definitely off (I didn’t know the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning and for all I knew they could include vivid hallucinations), I took another look out through the windscreen, this time trying to focus on more than just the thought _What the fuck?_ playing on loop in my head. Yep, pale yellow. Glowing. Uniform. There was a sort of edge all the way around quite a ways below my eyeline, and without much except the car for reference, it took a bit to force my still-waking-up brain to parse what I was seeing: it was where the wall met the floor. I was in a dome. I twisted to look through the back window. Yep. Big empty dome. When playing with the rear view mirror failed to provide any further information, I steeled myself and actually got out of the car.

 

With my new, mobile vantage point, I was able to gleam that I was _definitely_ inside a big dome, the walls and floor of which were a uniform pale yellow, and faintly glowing.

 

Okay then.

 

There was no obvious door. So. What did I have? Limited information. A car. A lot of cheap photography equipment on loan from the college, better be sure to get that back. Laptop and phone, the normal pens and papers and painkillers and coins that accumulate in any car, the clothes on my back, half a packet of potato chips and a few starbursts left over from my drive snacks, and a quarter of a thermos of cold coffee.

 

I drank the coffee.

 

Right. Okay then. Back to work.

 

Fancy glowing and featureless space seemed pretty afterlifey to me, so perhaps I was dead, but only if the afterlife was the schmaltzy home movie version. I put that theory into the ‘maybe’ pile. Hilarious prank seemed pretty far-fetched, too, because even if I had friends willing to drive three hours out into nowhere to scare me, I certainly didn’t have any who could afford a setup like this. You might be able to get glowy plastic off ebay or something, but using it to build a huge dome and move a car containing a sleeping person inside seemed like a pricey endeavour. One of those prank TV shows? Didn’t they have release forms and stuff you needed to sign?

 

The dome itself turned out to be rather smaller than it had looked from inside the car. It was, near as I could tell, somewhere between 10 and 15 meters wide. I touched the wall. This yielded less information than one might expect. It was vaguely staticky, so something electrical might’ve been happening in there, but without being able to see or feel anything clearly, I couldn’t tell if it was plastic or glass or what.

 

That seemed like all the information I was going to glean from inside the dome. Time to find the door. I closed my eyes against the glow, which was starting to give me a bit of a headache, and paced around the room, fingertips trailing gently along the wall. The static left my fingers numb about a third of the way around, but only a few paces after switching hands, I found the seam, barely more noticeable than the stuck-down end of a roll of tape. There was no way I could get anything under it to wedge it open. A key or a credit card just wasn’t going to fit.

 

I rummaged through my miscellaneous car pens until I found a black permanent marker and used it to outline the door. There, I could keep track of where it was; that meant actually opening it could be a later problem. It was barely wider than my car. I let myself imagine a handful of drunk teens (hey, I had no idea who was responsible for my current predicament, I could imagine them as drunk teens) trying to very quietly push my old clunker through that door without scraping the sides or waking me, and laughed. I briefly considered kicking at the door. No… all of the available explanations for my situations fell into two groups – one where kicking at anything was ineffectual or where getting me to freak out was playing right into some idiot’s hands, and I wasn’t giving them the satisfaction. I smiled to myself, trying to look vaguely amused by what was going on, and sauntered back to my car.

 

I finished off my travel snacks.

 

I was making my very last starburst last and mentally hating all of photography in general and my life choices specifically when a loud thud reverberated through my dome. Truth be told, it probably wasn’t actually all that loud, but in a featureless space with nothing but my chewing to fill the silence, it sure sounded like it was. Before I could be properly irritated by this, a door opened. Not the door I'd marked out; one further along the wall, where I hadn't checked after being so damn pleased with myself for finding the first door. Beyond the door was metal. An actual room of actual metal. On the off-chance that I was being filmed for television, I tried to look calm and unphased as I got smoothly out of the car and strolled over.

 

The room was only about the size of a very small elevator. I could easily brace my shoulders against one wall and touch the other with my feet if I wanted. I stepped in, and the door closed behind me, looking like a piece of featureless sheet metal indistinguishable from the others. The whole room was made of panels of sheet metal, interspersed here and there with dim LEDs. It looked like some kind of industrial cyberpunk nightmare on a budget, but it was a step up from mysterious glowing. Looking up, I realised that it was also a lot taller than an elevator. More like an elevator shaft.

 

I did not have time to consider the implications of this cheery thought before noticing a couple of rather more concerning things. Firstly: I was getting lighter. This is a difficult thing not to notice, no matter how stressful and confusing the situation, and in my case was made all the more insistent by the fact that some kind of force was pushing me into one of the side walls at the same time. My chips and starbursts were sending insistent messages that they regretted their recent pasts as much as I did and would very much like to return to the open air, thank you very much; I was trying to properly focus on denying this request when my feet left the floor for a few seconds, before graciously agreeing to make friends with it again. I hadn’t even intended to jump or anything.

 

I was still getting lighter. Soon there wouldn’t be anything to persuade my feet and the floor to maintain friendly relations at all. The sideways force vanished, leaving me adrift in the shaft and barely touching the floor; I pressed my hands and feet against the walls to hold myself down, and fought the panic that was making me light-headed. Or was that light-headedness the lack of gravity? I gulped for air.

 

This was the point where I noticed that the air was pretty thin. This is something that’s somewhat harder for the human body to make sense of than a lack of gravity, but survival-wise, it was rather more concerning. That was probably contributing to the light-headedness. It was probably also contributing quite a bit to my panic, and thus contributing secondarily to said light-headedness, but hey, I’m not a doctor.

 

I pushed hard on the door to the glowing room – at least, I assumed it was the door; I could easily have lost track between it and the other bits of identical sheet metal – but it wouldn’t budge. I looked for another way out. Up above me, the top of the shaft seemed to be open; I pushed off the floor and launched myself skyward.

 

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that if I was in an area with low air pressure and no gravity, then heading for an opening would put me, at best, in an area with low air pressure and no gravity. It would not solve my problem so much as potentially introduce new ones, such as the lack of handy nearby walls to hold myself in place, and quite possibly dangerous pointy things and/or the ire of anyone who intended for me to stay in the shaft. But I think I can be forgiven for not thinking straight at this point.

 

I was not forgiven for not jumping straight, at least not by the shaft walls. I slammed into them three times on my way up, like a bowling ball rolled down a bumper lane by a severely concussed child.

 

It _is_ an appropriate metaphor, okay? I hit my head on the way up.

 

The shaft was only about 15 metres high, which is still way too far to be freefalling face-down through a narrow steel tube (you think that jumping in zero gravity feels like moving _up_? It doesn’t). I hadn’t put very much force into the jump, so when I rose (fell?) above (below?) the open mouth of the elevator shaft, realised far too late that there was nothing to grab, and smacked right into the opposite surface, I didn’t immediately die of befuddled stupidity. I was even smart enough to grab at the lip of the shaft when I bounced back down in that direction.

 

Go me.

 

Okay. Time to look around. Get my bearings. I found my phone, which thankfully wasn’t broken, and turned the light app on.

 

I was in a tube.

 

I can’t really think of a better way to describe it. You could call it a corridor, I suppose, if there was gravity, but it was round and long and made of rings of something white and smooth. Some kind of fancy plastic, I assumed. Each “ring” was about two metres high (that is, the corridor was about two metres high), and about five metres long. Every three rings or so was a square hatch door with what looked like a car door handle, all currently closed, none of them seeming to agree on what part of the tube the floor was.

 

My elevator shaft had a hatch. I conscientiously closed it. I wasn’t too worried about being able to find where I was parked; my ingenious forethought in jumping up the shaft had left some clear blood smears where I’d busted my lower lip open on the wall above the hatch. So long as I still had the light of my phone, I’d be fine.

 

I checked the charge. Eighty per cent. Yeah, I was fine.

 

It was at this point that I figured it was probably a good idea to face reality. I was in the middle of a hotshot escape, and the idea of this being a TV show prank was starting to look pretty unlikely. No, one somebody starts playing with the gravity and the atmosphere… well, at that point, the list of possible scenarios gets pretty damn small. I felt stupid for thinking it, but… I had to say it. I made myself say it.

 

“Aliens,” I hissed through my teeth. “Fuck.”

 

With that little detail out of the way, I turned my attention back to looking for an exit. I swept my light down the tube one way; it opened into some kind of confusing network of bars and pipes. Perhaps not the best destination for somebody who couldn’t navigate an empty shaft. I turned and swept the light in the other direction, which gave me my first glimpse of the shadow person lurching towards me.

 

It was taller than me, about two metres tall – I could tell because its head touched the top of the tube-corridor and seemed to sort of spread out, leaking out along the sides like an otherworldly shadow bleeding into our narrow, circular reality. Its feet bled into the scenery where they touched it as well. If it had stood still, it probably would have looked like a vaguely odd silhouette, with arms a bit too long and legs a bit too thick and no apparent hands or feet, but it moved, and it moved _wrong_. I couldn’t tell you how, but knees and elbows didn’t bend right. The weight didn’t transfer right. Even squinting down a corridor in bad light I could see that.

 

Now, at this point, I was not in what you might call my most stable state of mind. The lighting changes and narrow shafts was giving me somewhat of a horror movie vibe. I was gasping in the thin air, unable to tell if I was suffocating or hyperventilating or both, I’d just taken a couple of sound knocks to the head and face, and my heart felt like it was trying to learn to pole dance inside a ribcage that was too narrow and kept getting clumsily kicked. If the universe or a god or even my own damn body had had any shred of mercy, it would have let me pass out. But it did not. For some reason my body decided that survival was more important than my own precious little feelings, and I was up, shot full of adrenalin.

 

Now, adrenalin is a great thing. It’s saved many a person from enemy spears or big tigers or whatever people used to have to use it for in the old days. But the ability to focus more keenly on the approaching horror was not an ability I particularly relished, a slight strength boost is a terrible thing to give somebody who’s had less than two minutes to learn how to move in zero gravity, and if my limbs weren’t already shaking, they definitely were now, which made grabbing the hatch I’d recently closed and launching myself as fast as I could out into the tube and away from that thing an even more difficult task. I did not want to go banging into the walls again; I wanted to zoom smoothly out of the end of the tube and into the area with bars and things and grab onto one and… and figure out what to do next from there.

 

Physics, as it turns out, didn’t care what I wanted. What physics cared about was that the corridor was quite long and my aim wasn’t great. It introduced me to the tube walls a few more times before dumping me into a wide open space filled with the pipes of all sizes that I’d glimpsed. They crossed the room, stretching to walls that I wasn’t going to waste time trying to make out with my phone light when I should be fleeing for my life; I put the phone between my teeth and snatched for the nearest one that was small enough to grab.

 

The pipe shuddered alarmingly as it stopped my flight, but held. My phone slipped from my teeth, clattering away into the darkness. It occurred to me that I had grabbed the pipe without knowing how strong it was, what was inside, or indeed whether it was going to burn the skin off my hand. Fortunately, it hadn’t.

 

Okay, now what?

 

A shadow being was hunting me through a shitty factory-style FPS environment, in the dark. I couldn’t really move; walking was out of the question and I wasn’t going to blindly jump into the darkness and hope to slam bodily into another pipe. At most I could slide back and forth along my pipe, but this struck me as monumentally pointless. I hadn’t, I’d noticed, passed out, despite the thin air, and my heart’s acrobatics had nothing to do with actual physical activity, of which I’d done very little. I was… probably fine, until the shadow thing caught me. I did need to piss though. That could wait.

 

It would have to, because something was approaching. A clear beam of light cut through the darkness, turning the pipes around me into a cluster of sharp angles and moving, segmented shadows. The light didn’t hurt; I hadn’t been in the dark long enough to properly adjust. Forcing myself to try to calm down. I leaned out from my pipe until I could see the source.

 

It was the shadow creature. It had a glowing head now, a bright searchlight right in the middle of its fucking face sweeping the area as it swung from pipe to pipe with its arms like a monkey. Those arms would whip out like tentacles, wrap around a pipe and draw it closer, then release and approximate the shape of a human arm again until they once more had to whip out. Its head turned… no, nothing turned, the neck didn’t move like a neck. The light just migrated around the head, until it was pointed at me.

 

Oh, FUCK no.

 

I turned, looked for a new pipe, but… then what? I was fleeing from the only light source, and I couldn’t really escape to anywhere. I had the vague notion of finding an escape pod or something, but it was becoming clear that I wouldn’t even know what one looked like, or how to program it to go to Earth, or even how to launch it. No, there was only one way I was going to be able to get rid of this fucker.

 

I turned back. I aimed my jump very carefully. He was getting closer, so close that I couldn’t possibly miss.

 

I leapt, snarling, hands closing around a throat. Hands moving straight _through_ a throat. I plunged straight through the figure, bits and pieces of something sticking to me as I hurtled for the wall and was able to grab a pipe at the last minute, lit by the head-light which had followed my movement. In that light, I was able to see that I was a scant couple of metres from the long tube corridor. I was also able to get a closer look at the bits of the shadow-thing that had clung to me. They were not shadow, but something small and hard, with very black wings. Moths? No. No, they were tiny winged spiders, each about a centimetre long, clinging to my arms and face and neck. I roared in surprise and brushed them off firmly. I did not, no matter what anyone might think, shriek in terror and start smacking at my arms and waving my hands ineffectually in front of my face, losing my grip on my pipe. You can’t prove otherwise.

 

The rest of the spider-being was quickly beside me, pulling me safely into the corridor. The spiders on me joined the main mass, apparently picking up on my subtle little hints that I might prefer some personal space. The light dropped out of its head to be caught by its stumpy, too-long arm, sinking into the spider mass like a spoon dropped into pudding. The spiders held it out to me.

 

It was my dropped phone. The screen wasn’t even cracked.

 

I took it. Then I took a long hop backwards, grabbing at hatch cover protruding from the tube wall to avoid just stupidly floating away.

 

“Thanks,” I said, to break the awkward silence. I cleared my throat. “So, uh… hello.”

 

“Hello,” the mass of spiders repeated in my exact voice. I blinked. The mass hadn’t opened any sort of mouth or anything. It had just… made sound. Somehow. Sound emanated from somewhere in the spider cloud, and I wasn’t about to get close enough again to tell where.

 

I thumped my chest. “I’m Charlie,” I said. “Char-lie.” Best to start with the basics.

 

“Hello Charlie,” the spiders said. “I am interpret.”

 

“You are interpret?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

 

The spiders hesitated. There was a faint rustling of some kind in the spider mass. I felt like I should know the sound but it was pretty low on my list of priorities right then. “I am the interpreter,” the mass corrected.

 

“Oh. Well then. Good.”

 

The interpreter rustled again. “Are you hurt?”

 

“No.” I brushed my busted lip. “I mean, nothing that won’t heal. I, uh… did I hurt you?”

 

“No.” The interpreter paid no attention to a dead spider that drifted past it at that particular moment. “I mean, nothing that won’t heal.” A pause, more rustling. “Can we stop fighting?”

 

I nodded. My heart was settling down for the first time in what felt like forever, and while I wasn’t too happy about the air pressure, I seemed to be getting better at the gravity. I grinned wide, ignoring the pain in my lip. Pain didn’t matter; not when I was just realising that I was about to have to say something I’d always wanted to say.

 

“I come in peace,” I said. “Take me to your leader.”


	2. Shanghai

The interpreter led the way down the tube. I followed closely, taking the opportunity to study them. They must have been watching me, too, because even though I was kind of drifting between hatches rather than actually walking, the interpreter’s faux-arms and legs moved in a noticeably more humanlike manner over our journey. The spiders, despite their wings, didn’t seem to be able to fly very well. Probably the air pressure, I supposed. They instead clung to each other, and used the interpreter’s height to brace it against the tube wall from the head and legs, spreading out a little to hold it in place and creating the bleeding shadow effect I’d noticed earlier. It was, being perfectly honest, creepier than a shadow; I’ve never really liked spiders. But at least they were real, discrete things, and not a sign of me being completely nuts or in some kind of underedited horror movie.

 

No, I was in some kind of alien B-movie. Or maybe a book. The movies tended to go more for invasions than abductions.

 

 _Focus, Charlie_. I was about to go talk to the alien leader. I was going to get some answers. I had to make a good impression for humanity’s sake, probably. Or at least convince them to send me home. Or find out what they wanted. I figured it wasn’t for weird experiments or as a delicious snack or alien zoo or anything – they would’ve just left me locked in the dome for that. I hoped they didn’t want me to be a diplomat and introduce them to humanity or something. I would be a really shitty diplomat.

 

I needed a lot more time to adjust to the situation, but it didn’t look like I was going to get it.

 

“So, uh, interpreter,” I said, “do you have a name?”

 

“Yes,” the interpreter said in that creepy, perfect imitation of my own voice.

 

“What is it? I can’t just call you ‘the interpreter’.”

 

More rustling. “I have many. The one most close to your pronunciation is...”

 

I’m not going to try to transcribe what the spiders said next. It was a jumble that sounded vaguely like something a human might be able to train themselves to pronounce with a few years’ practice and perhaps some minor surgery.

 

“Right. Uh. Glath...strer...”

 

The interpreter took pity on me. “It translates to...” more rustling inside the mass, for longer than usual this time… “‘facsimile of a perfect ceramic bowl with a fine white rim.’”

 

I blinked. “It does?”

 

“Approximately.”

 

“Okay. Glath, then.”

 

Glath accepted this nickname without comment. They stopped walking about halfway down the corridor and reached out to open a hatch on the right wall, spiders climbing under the handle en masse to lift it. Glath poured into the shaft. I followed.

 

It was, as I’d expected, pretty much identical to the shaft leading to my car’s dome. I dropped with rather more dignity than my initial shaft trip, pressing my hands against the walls to land gently on the bottom. I was feeling pretty good about myself when the hatch closed and a whole heap of spiders suddenly poured over me.

 

I fought the urge to scream or start mercilessly crushing bits of Glath as they reformed into a humanlike figure. The shaft was very confined, and I tried not to look too obvious about squeezing myself into a corner away from the tower of spiders. It’s not like I could really squeeze into anything without floating away, anyway.

 

“Prepare for gravity,” Glath said.

 

“What?” I managed to ask, before the room lurched and slammed me into a wall. It wasn’t that forceful, more sort of like a bus suddenly stopping when you’re not expecting it. It did press me into the corner away from Glath, which I guess was what I was trying to achieve. The force didn’t let up, but kept pressing me quite gently into the wall as gravity, blessed gravity, started to pull me down once more. Brilliant!

 

It was still sort of light for my taste when the sideways force stopped and the door opened into a room that was rather larger than the little glowing dome had been, lit by the sort of harsh white glow I’d come to associate with flourescent lights. It was about as wide as the dome, but instead of being a… well, dome, it stretched out to either side, the floor curving upward at an incline I couldn’t feel so that the ceiling eventually blocked my view of the rest of the room to either side. It took me a moment to process what I was seeing; I was in a bigger ring, wrapped around the central tube corridor at quite a distance away. I jumped experimentally. The gravity was fairly light, but whatever was going on, it was pulling me to the floor somehow, and from the look of the machines and the dragons scuttling about, this seemed to be true all the way around.

 

Oh yeah, there were dragons. Well, giant lizards, anyway. From shoulder to hip, they were about my size, but their tails were rather longer than my legs which gave them a bit of a boost in overall length. They had bodies like pale yellow goannas, with four stumpy legs and thick round middles under dry scales, but their legs didn’t look to be positioned right. However their bones worked under there, it wasn’t something I was familiar with. This was probably to make room for the wings, which were longer than my arms and were clearly limbs in their own right, not something plastered on over the shoulder and held in place with magic like winged reptiles in cartoons. Those wings were… bizarre. I could see something batlike in their basic shape, with hooked little thumbs at the joints and long supporting filaments that I suppose could be mutated fingers if you squinted, but the skin stretched between them was covered in something shimmery. Red and orange tinted with flashes of blue rippled along the surface of the wings as the beings moved under the harsh lighting of the room. Their heads were a bit goanna-like, too, although their eyes were far more prominent and their jaws were heavy and large. Despite the wings, these creatures were obviously far too dense to fly. As for their tails…

 

You ever seen a picture of a cat-o’-nine tails? Imagine it only has four tails. And those tails are most of your body length. And they’re black and red and yellow, and attached to the arse of a dragon, and obviously prehensile. And the ends look like tiny maces.

 

Wow, that was a lot easier to explain than I thought it would be.

 

Anyway, I saw four of these things walking around and poking at various machines that I’m not going to begin to guess at, brushing the thumb-hooks on their wings and the little maces on their tails through various areas above mysterious panels and somehow causing things to beep. Glath politely gave me a few moments to take all of this in before continuing to walk around the room. I tried to look as dignified as I could while strolling through unfamiliar gravity, but really I was taking long sort of hopping strides. Glath, eerily, took to imitating my movements, and we hop-strode around the room until the next ridiculous piece of nonsense came into view.

 

Said piece of nonsense was the biggest insect I’d ever seen, wired to the wall with bundles of fine white filaments. You know how toys are wired into their boxes with those little twist-ties? Well, imagine you were buying a toy six-legged praying mantis with a body length twice your height, a bunch of weird filaments dangling from its knees, and instead of those little claw things they have on their front legs, said legs just tapered into long, very pointy-looking lances. The mantis had two big, segmented, jewel-like eyes. It also had a bunch of random jewels stuck to its face, all cut to show off smooth, glittery facets, all different shapes and sizes.

 

Now, don’t get me wrong. If I was gonna be abducted by aliens, I was very happy that it wasn’t an entire ship full of flying spiders. That would have sucked. But I also didn’t want to have to meet an encyclopaedia’s worth of aliens right then. What happened to ships full of big-headed grey people with laser guns? I should’ve brought a camera from the car to photograph everyone. I wondered if it would be rude to take a picture on my phone.

 

Before I could decide, the filament bundles trying the alien to the wall released, and it dropped to its four back legs. Even with its back horizontal, it was still taller than me due to those frankly ridiculous spindly legs. It stepped forward, dipping so that one of its huge compound eyes (which was about the size of my head) was a handspan or so from my face. I would’ve flinched back, but that would’ve involved walking through a huge pile of spiders again; Glath had moved behind me.

 

It tilted its head; it wasn’t watching me with the compound eye, I realised, but with an assortment of gelatinous red blobs directly below it. (Note to self: all aliens are gross, apparently.) The few seconds before it pulled back felt like forever. It opened a set of wings I hadn’t noticed before and started to flutter them. So far, on my Grand Tour of the Breadth of Life in the Cosmos, the only thing without wings was me. I was beginning to feel a bit left out. I consoled myself with the fact that these didn’t look any more aerodynamic than those on the dragon-things; they seemed to be dozens of layers of very fine gossamer protected by a thick casing, so that when they fluttered they created vaguely pretty golden blurs behind the insect but not much in the way of lift.

 

Apparently satisfied with whatever it had wanted to see in my face very close up, the insect somehow produced a series of clicking and whistling sounds from its oversized mandibles. Behind me, Glath responded; they had changed shape, and if their two-metre human form loomed, this one took it up to eleven. Glath’s spiders now formed the spindly limbs of an imitation giant praying mantis, about two-thirds the height of the original. I knew I was effectively cornered wherever I went on the ship, but being sandwiched between these two wasn’t doing my mood any favours.

 

Glath spoke in my voice once more. “This is Captain Faceless,” they said.

 

“Captain Faceless?” I asked, bewildered.

 

“Yes.”

 

I pointed at the captain’s huge compound eyes and impossible-to-miss mandibles. “It has a face.”

 

Glath considered this a moment. “She is Captain Anonymous,” they corrected.

 

A nameless captain. Hooray. “Captain Nemo,” I muttered under my breath. “Wait, hold on, don’t – ”

 

But Glath was already clicking and whistling. I distinctly heard the word ‘Nemo’, creepily pronounced with my exact intonation, before the captain’s response.

 

“Captain Nemo is an acceptable designation,” Glath told me.

 

Fine. Whatever. Being on Captain Nemo’s spaceship made about as much sense as anything else.

 

Captain Nemo did some more clicking.

 

“You are the engineer of the spaceship Stardancer,” Glath translated. “You will be outfitted with appropriate protective equipment to scale the outside of the ship and repair – ”

 

“Wait,” I said. “Hold on. No. No, I’m not fixing anything for you fucks. You’re taking me home.”

 

A pause. More of Glath’s internal rustling.

 

“You are the engineer of the spaceship Stardancer,” Glath repeated. “You will – ”

 

“I am the copy editor of some shitty magazine on Earth,” I corrected. “And part-time uni student, I guess. I will be outfitted with appropriate transportation to get back home to my kids, who are probably worried sick by now because I left them with my sister and promised to be back by morning. Is it even morning yet? At home, I mean.”

 

“The Stardancer is now your home,” Glath told me. “You are the engineer of the spaceship – ”

 

“I heard your little speech the first time, stop sounding like a broken fucking record. I said no.”

 

Glath rustled. They spoke to the captain. The captain spoke back. Then, suddenly, she turned and darted away.

 

“Tell me, Glath, is this a promising sign or – ”

 

But she was already back, moving easily in the low gravity as if born in it (she probably was, I realised; why else would it be set so low?), a large bag dangling from one lance arm. It was one of those stripy canvas bags that some people use for storage, the kind that can fit a whole closet’s worth of clothes inside. It was, without a doubt, from Earth.

 

“We have the appropriate exchange,” Glath explained. The bag was dropped at my feet. I opened it.

 

It was filled to the brim with American money, the notes just tossed in on top of each other without being bundled. I scooped out a few handfuls. It looked to be all hundred dollar bills.

 

“Um,” I said.

 

“You are the engineer of Stardancer,” Glath said. Their tone hadn’t changed, so I had no idea if it was a question, or an order, or hope, or what. I stared.

 

“Okay,” I said after a moment. “Couple things. First, you can’t just show up on Earth with a huge bag of cash. If you give me this I basically have to launder it and I really don’t want to do that. I mean, sure, I’m all for money, but maybe something more subtle would be good so I don’t have to explain the pile of money in my basement until it’s all safely filtered into the economy one extra cup of nice coffee at a time. Second, this is American money. I’d have to exchange this. Do you think I can just dump this on the counter of a bank or money changer and be like “this in Australian dollars, please!” and they’ll just go “okay, sure” and not call the cops? That’s not happening. Third: you keep calling me the engineer of the Stardancer. That’s making me pretty nervous. Now, if you yanked me out here to pay me a ridiculous bunch of money for a few hours’ work and then send me home, well that’s a really weird choice since I’ve never been to space and don’t know how your ship works, but okay, whatever. So I’m hoping that’s what you mean, but just to be absolutely sure: just how long is this going to take?”

 

“You are the engineer of – ”

 

“Yes, fine, but how long do you want me to be the engineer of the spaceship Stardancer?”

 

A pause.

 

“How long does human live?” Glath asked.

 

“Yeah, that’s what I was fucking afraid of.” I rubbed my temples. “Hey, Glath, do me a favour. Use your weird scifi translator tech to translate the word ‘Shanghai’.”

 

More rustling. “A large city in Cheena by the Yangste – ”

 

“It’s pronounced ‘China’, and no, the other definition. Is that pretty much what’s happening here?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Great. Just fucking great. Okay, guys, look… I’m as happy as anyone that aliens turned out to be real and they finally decided to drop by our little planet, but this is a really shit first contact scenario. I mean, the world is full of people who would love to work on an interplanetary ship full of all sorts of cool unseen species for a bag of cash they’d never actually be able to spend in space, and when I was fourteen I probably would’ve thought this was the coolest thing ever, but I’ve got too much on Earth for this shit. There are smarter people, more sciencey people, people who are going to be a lot more cooperative than me, because they actually want to go see the cosmos or whatever with alien life forms. I’m a really bad choice for this. How about you drop me home, find someone better, and we’ll say no more about it, hmm? Actually, I can introduce you to my sister Kate. She’d be wetting herself right now. Also she’s a biologist, so I bet that’d be a bonus.”

 

Glath, who had been rustling the entire time I spoke, translated this for the captain. After a brief discussion, Glath switched back to English. “Earth is no longer within range. The cordons have closed.”

 

“Yeah, well, get it within range again.”

 

“You are the engineer of – ”

 

“Ok, fuck you!” I stormed off back to the exit shaft, which was still open. The door closed behind me; I waited for the gravity to drop and jumped up to the central tube corridor. It was at this point that I realised I’d run out of places to petulantly storm off to. I wasn’t sure how to open the door back to my car dome, which was a pity because my car was a fantastic place to sulk. I didn’t want to go somewhere new and perhaps get trapped and need rescuing. I still needed to piss, but I had no idea where the toilet was or how alien toilets even worked. Which left the huge room of mysterious pipes. That seemed like a suitably broodable place.

 

Lit phone between my teeth, I pushed myself down the corridor, making it almost all the way to the end without smacking into something, and out into the pipe room. It was far easier to navigate when I wasn’t fleeing a mysterious shadow figure. I found a couple of pipes that crossed in a way that approximated a seat shape and sat down, or at least floated in the seat space. I was really getting the hang of the lack of gravity, which pissed me off. That was a space skill. I didn’t want space skills.

 

And why the fuck did Captain Nemo and Glath the Spider Monster think I could be their engineer? I knew nothing about engineering. I barely remembered fractions. I was pretty sure engineers needed calculus and shit. If they were happy to go around abducting people, why not just abduct a bunch of humans and have a better chance of getting one who could actually help them?

 

But I was going to help them, wasn’t I. I was going to learn everything I had to to fix their stupid broken machine, because I had no choice in the matter. I couldn’t exactly hijack the ship; I didn’t know how to fly it. No; for now, I was stuck. So for now, if first contact was gonna be between some clueless chump like me and a ragtag ship of spiders and dragons and giant bugs, then we were just going to have to make do with what we had. No matter how much I might hate the crew of the Stardancer right then.

 

Glath settled beside me in their approximately human shape, imitating my pose.

 

“Hypothetically,” I said, “if I refused to do any engineering, what would happen here?”

 

After considerable rustling, Glath responded, “the Stardancer would either break down in space or find an appropriate engineer elsewhere.”

 

“And what happens to me? I mean in the situation that we don’t all die in a broken ship?”

 

“That would depend on the value of your bodily materials on-ship compared to off-ship.”

 

I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but it seemed like my interpreter might have just threatened to eat me, or possibly sell me into slavery. I decided not to ask for clarification in case I was right.

 

“You know I don’t know any of the machines you’re going to want me to fix, right?”

 

“The process will be explained to you. We need an engineer because we no longer have any crew capable of scaling the outside of the craft.”

 

‘No longer have’. I filed that away to ask about later. “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Here’s how we do this. You’re going to show me where the toilet is. And then...” I gave a grin that I hoped looked a lot more sincere than it was… “you’re going to start teaching me how this spaceship works.”

 


	3. Orbits of Metal and Plastic

Sometimes I look back on my life and try to figure out exactly how I ended up on the edge of charted space with the Princess, outrunning the authorities. It is not, I suppose, a difficult question; every step in the sequence makes sense. I chose my Template because he caught my interest. I followed the Princess because my Template did. I was here, on a poorly maintained biohauler that was dangerously unfit for the flight-and-raiding work to which we were pressing it and inefficiently over-outfitted for out small crew, because the previous two Stardancers had been lost and we had had no choice but to commandeer the only oxygen-supporting ship within reach. I was skirting a dangerous fringe to outrun the authorities pursuing the Princess, and now, here, a dangerous creature from a quarantined world was loose on our ship, meekly following me about while I explained the basic ship’s design and function.

“So let me get this straight, Glath,” Charlie the Engineer said after attending to some personal tasks and meeting me back in the filtration area, “there’s no actual gravity on this ship? No weird scifi space magic?”

I still did not have a translation for the term ‘scifi’. I assumed unimportance from context and answered the main question. “All objects have gravity,” I explained. I knew that human technology was unsophisticated – we would never have dared to capture a human had they technical competence, imminent shipboard failure or not – but this was even more primitive than I had expected.

Charlie waved a hand in a gesture I did not yet know. I carefully observed the movement of arm segments. “I meant,” it said, “strong gravity, like in the control room and the dome thing.”

I assembled my sentences. “That is false gravity built from inertia,” I explained, “due to the orbits of metal and plastic.”

Charlie flicked its eyelids at me. I waited for further communication. After a few more seconds it said, “I didn’t understand that.”

“The outer areas rotate,” I explained. I quickly shifted my mass into the shape of the station to demonstrate, and when this proved confusing, into one ring. Charlie’s eyelids pulled back from its eyes.

“Oh! Like clothes in a washing machine. Or one of those spinning rides at the show that plasters you against the wall. That explains the sideways movement in the shafts when the gravity is coming on… yeah, okay, I think I get it. Rotating rings around a still centre tube, right. So what’s with all these pipes and shit?”

I translated the most important-sounding parts of the speech and guessed the rest. “These are for filtration, to collect and purify the station’s materials.”

“Right. Vaccuum of space and all, probably hard to resupply. How do… no, never mind, I probably wouldn’t understand. But why not spin the whole station? I mean I’m no highly advanced space traveller, but the less moving parts, the less something can break, right?”

“This ship is for transporting sensitive cargo,” I said, “which many need to be stored under various levels of gravity.”

“Cargo? We’re the U-Haul of the galaxy? I mean we, uh, we transport goods for people?”

“The previous owners of this ship did. It is not ideally suited for our purposes. We acquire what we need to survive.”

“From other ships?”

“When we need to.”

“We’re space pirates? I’ve been shanghaied by fucking space pirates?” Charlie bared its teeth, a gesture that had been confirmed as aggressive by its previous attack on me, but made no move to attack again. It simply tipped its head back, giving a loud, vocalised shudder. I memorised the sound and the jaw placement while translating ‘pirates’. “Somehow, this seems to be getting weirder and fucking weirder. Just so we’re clear, I’m not murdering anyone for shiny pirate booty. Don’t… don’t bother translating that. I promise it’s not worth the effort. So the station spins – what needs fixing?”

“A rotor.” I used my mass to show what it looked like. “It is not part of the rotation apparatus; it is a direction stability maker for the… rocket.”

Charlie bobbed its head up and down and said, “Okay. And what do I do?”

“There will be a bent pin, this long.” I aligned some of my community into a bar to demonstrate. “It will be bent. You will remove it and join a replacing.”

“That’s it?”

“It is not complex. You were chosen for being good at this.”

“Good at this? Why the hell do you think I’m good at this?”

“You were observed quickly and precisely fitting modular items. This is how we known you are excellent in your caste tasks.”

Charlie watched me an unusual span of time, several of its facial muscles subtly changing position. I tried to memorise the sequence, but with neither context for the movements nor an ability to replicate movement at such a small resolution, the information was not useful to me.

“Are you telling me,” Charlie said slowly, “that you thi – that you guys knew I was an amazing engineer because you watched me put a camera together to photograph space?”

I translated ‘camera’ and ‘photograph’. These must have been the devices that Charlie had been assembling. “Two cameras,” I clarified.

“Man,” Charlie muttered, angling its face away from me. “Fuck photography.” None of those words made sense in sequence, so I ignored them. Charlie entangled its fingers and pushed its arms forward, bending the fingers back and producing several mildly alarming cracking sounds from inside its hands. “Okay then. Take out bendy bar, put in straight bar, don’t drop anything in space. One question, Glath – you said earlier that there was no longer anyone in this ship who could go outside to do this repair. So, just out of curiosity… what happened to the other engineer? Shot by space cops? Decided life in Weird Bug and Dragon World wasn’t worth living any more and ended their own life?”

“He was crushed by a rotary arm while attempting this repair,” I admitted.

“Of course he fucking was.” Charlie pressed its fingers into the sides of its face at eye level. “Just once, I want my pessimism to be proven wrong. Is that too much to ask?”

I had no answer to that question, so I explained that I needed to measure Charlie for a space suit, and it let me, barely making more movement than the occasional shudder as I moved over it to determine the appropriate dimensions. I supposed that it was probably meek and obedient because we had taken care to get an engineer while it was separated from any warriors, but I was still a little surprised. I was beginning to wonder why the Earth was quarantined so heavily; surely their warriors were fearsome, but all that was needed for anything else was a little care. What was everybody so afraid of?

* * *

According to Glath, my “appropriate protection” would still take a bit of finagling, as alien space suits apparently weren’t one-size-fits-all, especially when four limbs was seemingly an unusual number to have. (Pro tip: don’t let spiders measure you.) So I spent the time indulging in a tour of the ship and taking photos of everything on my phone to show people later. What? Denial is an emotionally healthy response to abduction.

Captain Nemo and her Mattel Twist-Tie Interface had cleared me access to certain parts of the ship, so Glath had to show me how to actually open quite a few doors. This mostly involved sticking my hand through the empty space over specific areas of wall, which was apparently very clearly signposted if you happen to be able to see in the infra-red spectrum. The unlock zones to the hatches from the main corridor were under the lips of the handles, which made them easy to unlock, but the rest of the doors weren’t all that well set up for my poor little human eyes. I decided that ensuring appropriate telegraphing of affordances of ship electronics fell into my role as ship engineer and clearly marked and labelled the areas with my permanent marker. If Captain Nemo had a problem with it, she was welcome to just drop me home.

That would save me having to initiate my Plan for that. It wasn’t a very complicated plan. It probably didn’t justify the capital letter. But the situation was dramatic enough, I decided, that anything that had a chance of working could get a capital. The value of the capital had dropped due to dramatic inflation. The Plan was, in fact, very, very simple: learn how the ship works. Steal the ship. Take it home.

Simple was good. Less moving parts meant less things to break.

So I paid attention as I was shown how to access the bridge (Glath had some complicated term for the ring full of dragons where Captain Nemo worked, but there was no way I was going to pass up the chance to refer to it as the bridge), the engineering equipment storage area (most of which I didn’t recognise), and the ring calibrated to my preferred air pressure and gravity. This, as it turned out, was a full ring as large as the bridge and not a single glowing dome, which had apparently been erected “for my comfort”. After some confusing conversation I was able to determine what had led to this idea and patiently explained to Glath that while our sun can get quite bright, humans do not necessarily like average midday strength sunlight blasted at them uniformly from every direction. It took some effort to convince Glath that I actually did want dimmer, unidirectional lighting that I could turn off at night.

“Why do you wish to handicap your primary long-distance sense?” Glath asked, having finally mastered enough tonal inflection to properly ask a question.

“It’s just how it works,” I shrugged. “Humans sleep better in the dark.”

“But there is no need to sleep. Energy and safety are provided.”

“It’s not… wait, don’t you sl – ugh, never mind. Humans sleep regularly. Every night when we can. If the light’s always on, I’ll still sleep, I’ll just sleep badly and not be able to work properly.”

“If you can see, you will feel safer,” Glath stated, “and feel better.”

“Is anything likely to attack me on this ship that bright daylight would help me deal with?”

“No, you are safe.”

“Then how would light help? I don’t… I’m not a psychologist, okay? I just know that we sleep better in the dark, and we need sleep to make our brains work properly, and if something I can take on in the light attacks me, I guarantee I can take it on in the dark, too.” I grinned, and Glath shifted; were they flinching back, or did I imagine it?

Glath didn’t seem to understand, but they took my word for it, so I was given control of the lighting and the limited temperature control that was allowed on the ship. There was no set mess hall, but my ring included bathroom facilities, which meant I could shower in decent gravity if I could figure out how to pipe the water in such a way to create a shower. I had the whole ring to myself, apparently; I was the only member of the entire crew who was comfortable in such high gravity and air pressure.

Lucky me.

After explaining several relevant physiological details to Glath – yes, I was sure about the lighting; yes, I could see in low light too, so long as it was in my visible spectrum; yes, I could tolerate a fairly broad range of temperatures and I generated my own heat even while sleeping so if I had insulation I wouldn’t freeze to death; no, I didn’t know much about human nutrition so we were going to have to figure out Food Or Poison Roulette later – a pale blue praying mantis found us and presented me with a space suit. The mantis was smaller than Captain Nemo, about two thirds her height with thicker limbs and little mantis claws instead of intimidating lances for hands. (Not that I know exactly what praying mantis claws look like. They probably didn’t have weird skinny tentacles in the middle, but hey, I need something to compare these things to.) Its wings were longer and thinner; at least, the casing protecting them on its back was. I realised that it was this sort of mantis alien, not Captain Nemo herself, that Glath had been imitating earlier. Probably some sort of political thing there that wasn’t any of my business. This one definitely had less jewels plastered on its face, bearing only a couple of fragments of ruby, or at least something red, each about a third the size of my fist. This may have been because its face was covered in way more eyes. Not just compound and red blob eyes, but little blue blob eyes, black slit eyes, and a few tentacles on each “cheek” that, if I was interpreting the way they moved about correctly, were also tipped with eyes.

Well, at least its mandibles were much smaller.

I took the suit from the mantis. Glath whistled at it, and it left. It didn’t seem to be able to walk very easily in my high-gravity environment. I turned the suit over in my hands. It wasn’t bad work, I thought, for somebody who had only just learned what humans looked like, but it also wasn’t anything any human would ever expect someone to wear. It looked… well, it looked like a human skin. Like somebody had sliced a human from throat to crotch, sliced down each limb, and removed the body from inside before sticking a helmet on top. It was wide enough to give me some freedom to move, probably because Glath had measured me clothed; it looked like it would only cling like a creepy extra skin on the hands.

The texture wasn’t doing it any favours, either. It was rubbery and just a little bit moist, sort of squishing under my fingers as if it’d just been lifted off a person and had the blood quickly washed off. I reasoned that real human skin probably wasn’t that thick. I reasoned that it just smelled like plastic, and probably was. I reasoned that one would want a space suit to be flexible, their own body shape, and peel off and on easily.

This reasoning did not help.

I pressed edges of what I couldn’t help thinking of as the incisions in the suit together. They knitted firmly, leaving a tiny seam. I pulled; they didn’t come apart.

“Breathe to remove,” Glath advised.

I breathed deeply a few times. Then my brain kicked in and I breathed out onto the seam. It sprang open again after a couple of breaths.

“And this is safe, right?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll hold air?”

“Yes.”

“It won’t feel the air inside it and bust open in the vaccuum of space?”

“It will not.”

“It’’ll definitely keep me alive in space, right?”

“Yes.”

“Only you said your previous engineer, who I’m sure had a lot more experience at this, died doing this repair.”

“He did not die because asphyxiation or suit failing. He died when his organs were crushed by a rotary arm. I am confident that his suit was completely intact for several minutes after his death.”

“Oh. Well, that makes me feel a lot better.”

“Good.”

“I didn’t… no, never mind, I’ll teach you sarcasm later. For now, it’s time for me to go out there and try not to die.”


	4. Space is Big

From the outside, the Stardancer was ugly.

I guess I’d grown up looking at spaceships in fiction, with the occasional video of a shuttle launched from Earth for good measure. But what space needed, apparently, was neither style nor aerodynamics. The Stardancer was a big fat cylinder with rounded ends, and out of those ends stuck long poles, perpendicular to the rest of the ship. There were four poles sticking out of each end, sandwiching the ship between two giant metal X’s, each pole about twice the width of the ship itself. They were rotating slowly, although I knew (from the lack of artificial gravity) that the middle of the ship wasn’t. This did not look like a good ship for ambushing people in space and demanding their cargo. It did not look like it should have ‘dancer’ anywhere in its name.

But I wasn’t inclined to reflect on that too much, because I didn’t want to spend any more time out in space than I had to.

The space suit wasn’t too bad. It was more comfortable than most of the ship, actually, largely because it was pressurised at a level that didn’t make me feel nauseous. Maybe I should just wear it whenever I was outside my own ring. It did not, contrary to my explanations, cling anywhere, even on the hands; a thin layer of air sat between me and the suit all the way around, provided I stayed completely still. It was a little unnerving to have something lightly brush any joint I bent as I pushed elbows, knees and fingers into the fabric, but that was surprisingly easy to get used to. I had explained just what I needed free to be able to breathe and see to Glath, and the mouthpiece I was gripping in my teeth was vaguely the right shape to be able to breathe through. The tank strapped to my front under my suit (not so much a tank as a pouch made of the same material as the suit, the only hard bit being what I assumed a system of fancy valves or something near the pipe to my mouth) seemed way too small, but Glath had insisted that it had enough air and explained something about inert gas recycling that I didn’t try all that hard to remember. The helmet was basically a big plastic fishbowl. The plastic was dark (there had been some confusion over just what light I could see with and what was deadly radiation, not helped by the fact that I had no clue), an issue resolved by making sure that the light strapped to my forehead was really, really bright. It barely reflected off the inside of the helmet at all, a phenomenon I decided not to ask about in case Glath actually tried to explain. Even the belt of tools around my waist was reasonably comfortable, with everything secured so it wouldn’t flail about and tear my suit.

No, the suit was, although clearly designed by somebody who wasn’t human-shaped, generally fine. It was space itself that I had a problem with.

It’s really big, as it turns out.

There was no sun. We were far enough from any star that the sky was a dark blanket seeded with millions of bright points like dandruff on black felt, and the only light to see the ship by was the one strapped to my face, sweeping a wide, white band over the hull. There was the ship, and me, and nothing. So very, very much of nothing, and the only thing keeping me from it was a very short tether of the same material as my suit.

You might be wondering how, if I was tied closely to this giant spiky cylinder in space, I was able to observe its general shape so easily. This amazing privilege was courtesy of the position of the bent bar I needed to replace. The damaged ‘rocket’ was not conveniently stuck to the hull next to an airlock. No.

As it turned out, those big protruding poles were hollow. They were about three metres thick with the two metres inside being void. As in space. As in, not accessible from the inside of the ship.

Oh no, the only way to access the inside of these bars, and therefore the repair I needed to do, was to exit through an airlock at the end of the filter room, which took you outside one of the rounded ends of the ship. Then my tether had to be secured to a pole about the width of my arm to hold me near the hull as I made my way over the dome and up the 3 metre thick hollow bar, regularly untying and re-tying the tether every time I had to get it over a bracket securing the pole to the ship.

Oh, and of course the support pole didn’t extend over the lip of the tunnel I had to slip into. Oh no, it stopped a little way away, and a new one started a little way on the inside. Which meant that I had to wrap my body around the half-metre-thick lip, stretch down to untie the tether, and then very carefully inch inside backwards and catch the new rail with my foot. In the two-metre tunnel, I might be able to brace my hands and feet against the walls and stop myself from floating into space if it came to it… if I happened to float away at the right angle. It wasn’t something I wanted to try.

Inside the tunnel, the gravity didn’t bother me so much. It was basically like being in the tunnel of the central axle of the ship, if I was careful not to glance out into space, and the support pole seemed secure enough. I forced myself to calm down and keep my eyes on that pole as made my leisurely way in. The rocket I was looking for was supposed to be about five metres in, and it was going to be pretty much directly above or below the support pole, depending on how I’d oriented myself coming in.

I found it without too much trouble. It took up a good half of the tunnel. It looked pretty much like I expected a rocket to look, a cylinder with one rounded end. The other end was covered in a metal grille.

The bar I needed to replace was securing some kind of balancing mechanism to the back of the rocket. It looked vaguely like one of those ball-knocking physics toys, crossed with a gyroscope. At least I think so. I don’t see many gyroscopes. It was frozen, the bent bar stopping it from moving.

Very gently, I unscrewed a cap holding the bar in place and pulled it out. Everything stayed vaguely in the right place – good. I took the replacement bar from my belt.

And that’s when everything went to shit, because that’s when I happened to glance up.

I’d sort of forgotten about the previous engineer, the one who had been crushed by some sort of rotary arm. I remembered him rather suddenly when my light glanced off the mess of pale blue chitin and yellow blood jumbled with ripped space suit fabric about two feet from my face.

Now, the thing about suddenly confronting a mashed-up alien you’d forgotten about in a confined space is, your first thought isn’t ‘oh, it’s a harmless corpse, how sad.’ Your first thought is ‘Aaah fuck that nightmare monster is attacking me!’, which is why I screamed and raised my arms, reflexively, to hit it.

Both metal bars slipped out of my gloved hands. They dinged off the currently motionless giant fan the poor engineer was caught in and sailed away over my shoulder, down the tunnel. By the time I realised what was happening, they were out in space.

Well fuck.

I tried to ignore the corpse and focus on the problem at hand. This, by the way, is a very difficult thing to do. He had clearly been one of the praying mantis people, his colour and height (as best I could tell) about identical to the one who had given me my suit. There were streaks of sticky blood on his suit, where he’d struggled, and on the inside of his transparent fishbowl helmet. It clung to the fan blades, and big streaks of it made a rough ring around the tunnel that the fan completely took up; he must have been dragged around the walls until he’d finally jammed something up. Poor bastard. Whatever blood wasn’t stuck to a surface must have drifted into space a while ago, because I couldn’t see any of it. (But then, why hadn’t I noticed any on my way in? Had it drifted deeper into the ship instead? Ew.) Some of his limbs had been broken at the joints, and two of his forelegs (or forearms?) were completely torn off.

He wasn’t my problem right now, though. The weird physics thing was. I’d only brought one bar, and now it was off in space, beyond reach.

I made a mental note for future repairs: bring spare everything.

What could I do here, though? Could I go back and get another? No; I had a feeling that the parts of the physics thing, which were already drifting slowly out of place (I lined them up again so I wouldn’t lose track of what went where) would drift all over the place by the time I got back. We’d lose some deeper in the tunnel, and some into space, I just knew it.

Could I carry it back with me? No; it was too bulky and in too many pieces. Not a chance. I glanced at the dead engineer. In extremis, I reflected, a corpse could be a lot of things. A spiritual anchor, in most societies. A food source, to people starving. And to someone in my situation, a torn pace suit was essentially a giant pocket.

“Say, buddy,” I mumbled around by breathing apparatus in a voice only I could hear, “can you hold something for me?” I took a photo of the physics thing with my phone so I could reference where all the parts went, and pulled the engineer forward, looking for a tear big enough to stash the parts inside.

I was partway through this operation when I realised that if I dislodged whatever part of him was jamming the fans, there would be two half-pulped engineer corpses in this tunnel.

Right. Solve that first. He’d clearly been dragged around the tunnel several times, from the delightful blood painting, and the corpse seemed pretty loosely attached to the machinery. What was jamming it? Nothing at the edges. I examined the central axle and found my answer.

He’d tried to grab at the middle of the fan for stability. There were multiple layers of fan, it seemed; at least two. His forearm had been torn off, and went between both sets of blades, jamming them.

I couldn’t help but notice that the blades were probably pretty powerful, but that arm had held them for the time it took the Stardancer crew to abduct me and get me out here.

I also couldn’t help but notice that, the arm was both pretty uniformly round, and about the width of the metal bar I needed.

I pulled the bulk of the corpse out, tucked a couple of stray limbs under the tether support bar to hold him in place, and inspected him. His limbs were broken, leaking what little blood he still had. His wings were pulp, a mix of bug blood and fragments of gossamer like the world’s most poorly maintained windshield in mosquito country. Several of his eyes had ruptured, beaten against the inside of the helmet. But all of the external damage seemed to be in these vulnerable areas; wings, eyes, joints. Nothing made of blue alien chitin was even cracked.

Good enough.

Making sure my tether was secure, I reached up to the part of alien arm sticking out of the fan, ground my teeth on my breather, and yanked sideways and out as quickly and powerfully as I could.

The fans knocked the arm in my hands back, pushing me away, and I flew to the end of my tether before I could get a grip on anything. I managed to keep a grip on the arm and braced myself to face the sudden onrushing gust of the fan… only to realise that there wasn’t any. Oh, right. No air. The fan blades whirred silently, smoothly, in the vacuum. So long as I didn’t touch them, they might as well not be there.

So what were they for, then?

I put all the physics bits where my photo said they should go and slid the arm between them. I had to break the mantis claw off the end to fit the cap back on, and it wasn’t exactly a pretty repair – it seemed a little loose, for one thing – but it fit, and it stayed, and the parts moved in ways that looked intentional.

It would do, until I had to make this journey all over again with another damn bar.

I used torn, empty bits of the ex-engineer’s space suit to tie him to my back. “Let’s go home, buddy,” I mumbled. “You deserve it. You just saved the ship.”

* * *

* * *

Charlie dropped through the airlock, fell through the filter room, and did not stop until they reached me in the centre axle. As it approached, I noticed that it had rather more bulk than when it left. Was this an unknown human strait? The suit was not designed to handle such drastic changes in volume!

But then I saw the blood, and Charlie untied the lifeless Kakrt from its back. It spat the breather from its mouth and tried to pull its helmet off, and there was a tense moment where I tried frantically to explain without sound (which would be very difficult to hear through the suit) that Charlie would probably cause a lot of physical damage to itself if it suddenly went from a high-pressure suit to a lower-pressure environment. I do not know if my message got through, but I managed to persuade Charlie to keep the helmet on until reaching their own ring of the ship.

When it was finally safe to do so, Charlie removed the helmet with excessive force, spat out the rebreather, and contracted multiple muscles around its mouth and nose.

“I probably have to go back out there,” it said. “I lost the bar I needed. It’s in space somewhere.”

“And the stabilising arpeture?” I asked.

“Seems to be working for now. I used the arm of that… of the previous mechanic.” Its face became paler.

“I do not yet know your body language. Are you experiencing a problem?”

Charlie swept its head in a half-circle a few times, which did nothing to aid my understanding. “I just… haven’t seen a body before,” it said.

“You are a carnivore,” I pointed out.

“An omnivore, yeah, but animals are different. I haven’t seen a dead person.”

Of course. Charlie was not a warrior. I realised that bringing an unaccompanied engineer on board might not have been fair. We knew so little of how human castes worked; what if it could not adapt?

“He did not die in battle,” I reassured Charlie. “His death does not indicate increased danger for you.”

“Not really the point, but good to know. I brought him back so you guys could… I don’t know, do whatever aliens do for funerals.” Charlie bunched its upper face muscles and looked at me. “Did you drag him on board against his will, too?”

I took some time to assemble my sentences in a clear way that would not provoke further questions. “He was of the original crew,” I explained. “He… helped to plan our mission out into space, beyond the law.”

“To be pirates.”

“Yes.”

“Fuck him with the rest of you, then.”

“Charlie, do you need to eat?”

“Hmm? Yeah, probably. I’m hungry, but I don’t feel like it after that.”

Hungry, and yet not wanting to eat? I ignored this puzzling inconsistency for now. “What nutrients do you require?”

“Fucked it I know. Why would I have an answer to that? Told you, you should have taken the biologist.”

“We needed an engineer.”

“Ah, yes; I’m sure the task of replacing a simple bar would blow a biologist’s mind. We need, you know; sugars, fats, vitamins.”

I checked for a translation of these terms. The translation did not give me the context I needed. “It is very important that we find out – ”

“Okay, you know what, Glath? Why don’t you go find the most delicious thing you have, and I’ll eat it, and if I die, we’ll know that was the wrong thing. Hmm?” It bared its teeth at me, eyes flared and cheek muscles stiff. “I mean, it seems to me that this is the sort of thing you should work out before you abduct someone, but what do I know? I’m just some dumb disposable engineer, aren’t I?”

“No member of the crew is – ”

“No? Then tell me this, Glath – how did you guys know what needed doing out there? How did you know how that other poor bastard had died?”

“I do not understand.”

“Really? Then let me break it down for you. This suit you’ve got for me here doesn’t have any kind of way to communicate with the ship in it. No radio or nothing. Given that your guys were able to whip it up in no time and it’s got this nice fancy bubble helmet, which I notice is different to the previous engineer’s helmet since I could easily see through that glass, I’m going to go ahead and guess this isn’t a matter of difficulty or a resource problem. So I’m guessing that that kind of equipment just isn’t part of your standard setup for space suits, right?”

“I do not know of any space suits with such a feature.”

“Sound weird and inefficient, but okay, I’m sure that makes alien sense. So you send me out there and say ‘this bar, in sthis spot, us busted’, and tell me how to fix it. You tell me that the previous engineer got caught in a ‘rotary arm’. But you don’t tell me that I’m going to run straight into his fucking corpse out there, or that there’s a fan thing that needs to be unjammed – I did that too by the way – and I’m guessing that fan thing was important or it wouldn’t be there. So, I’m thinking, why wouldn’t you tell me about that shit? You didn’t know, did you? And yet, you had so much information about this repair? When you knew how that engineer died?” Charlie stepped toward me, lips still pulled back to bare teeth, gloves still coated in its predecessor’s blood. I pulled back.

“I didn’t see anything like a camera out there,” Charlie continued, its voice lowering significantly in volume. “I admit I don’t know what your cameras would look like, but everything in front of the rocket thing was smooth metal and everything behind would be blocked by the fan and very obvious alien corpse complete with horror-game blood splatter. So how did you know how they died, Glath, and how did you know about the repair, if you didn’t know about the other stuff?” Charlie stepped forward again. “There was a witness, wasn’t there? A second engineer? See, I can’t help but notice that the part where you have to untie from the outside tether rail and slip inside to retie would be so much easier with a tethered buddy to hold onto. It’s a two-person job, isn’t it?”

“Tyzyth tried to pull Kakrt from the rotary arms,” I explained. “It was impossible. He was forced to withdraw. I assume he did so before Kakrt became stuck; we assumed he would be flung into space.”

Charlie bobbed its head down. Its eyes had started leaking fluid, and when it spoke, its voice increased dramatically in volume. “Then why the fuck,” it said through bared teeth under a scrunched nose, “would you send me, some random alien who has never been in space before, out there to do it alone without this Tizzy… this other engineer for backup? You clearly weren’t going to send them out alone, you had to rope me into it. See what I mean? Disposable.”

“Charlie, your eyes are compromised.”

“There is nothing wrong with my eyes!” Charlie rubbed a blood-free part of its forearm across their eyes, clearing most of the fluid. “You want to know what I eat, Glath? Take some of my blood – anything in that is probably fine. Our blood takes food and stuff to our cells, so… wait, I’m pretty sure it takes garbage away, too… fuck, I shouldn’t have dropped out of high school. Fuck it. We’ll figure it out later. Right now, I’m going to take a shower, and then go to sleep, and you’re going to leave me the fuck alone for about ten hours unless there’s another engineering emergency that your other engineer can’t, for some reason, do. Like if that arm I stuck in there breaks or something. If not, putting a real bar in is just going to have to fucking wait.”

There were a lot of unfamiliar words in Charlie’s speech. I started to translate. Charlie pulled its eyelids close together. “Just go away, Glath,” it said loudly. “Is that fucking simple enough for you?”

I went away.

I had to present Kakrt to the Princess.

* * *

* * *

As much as I wanted to tear the space suit off immediately, I took the time to wash the alien blood off it first. I didn’t want that stuff spreading all through my clothes or sticking to my skin. The hygiene facilities weren’t exactly set up for somebody human-shaped, but that was something to fix later; for now, I figured out how to turn on and combine the very hot water and the quite cold water in a combination that didn’t hurt, and stood under it.

I’d calmed down a little while taking the space suit off. Breathing on the seam to release it took quite a while when you had a whole suit to take off. My clothes underneath were, apart from a little sweat, the same condition they’d been in when I went in. Apart from a couple of small bloodstains from where I’d slammed my face into things, they mostly carried the evidence of my time on Earth. They smelled of dirt and crushed grass where I’d knelt to adjust my cameras. I put them carefully aside. I was going to have to wash them eventually, but not yet.

There was no soap. I didn’t care. I rubbed steaming water into my skin, closed my eyes, and sighed.

Okay. I needed to calm the fuck down. I needed to get a handle on the situation. I couldn’t let a little thing like being graphically confronted with my predecessor’s violent death unseat me. I was in an unstable situation, and I needed to get out of it. I needed to get a fucking grip. I needed to figure out how the ship worked, find where Earth was, and get home.

I needed to figure out how to not starve or poison myself, too. Were vitamins and proteins the same over or were they an evolution thing? Would every planet with life, say, a vitamin A, or were there just too many possible vitamins that could exist? I didn’t know. I didn’t know how complicated vitamins were.

I also didn’t know how restricted water use was on a spaceship, I realised, after I’d been standing motionless in my makeshift shower for several minutes. I sighed, stepped out, and used my shirt to dry myself.

I’d probably need towels and clothes and stuff, too, I realised. The crew had been using my ring as storage to random goods, and there were a lot of big cubic containers lying around; they might contain something. But that could wait.

For now, I went and sat in my car.

And I opened my laptop.

I knew I shouldn’t be using my electronics so much. They were going to run out of charge at some point, and while I could charge my phone from my car, that too was going to run out. And then I’d be stranded, electronically. I didn’t think there were too many car batteries and Australian power points on the Stardancer. But for now, fuck it. I put the laptop on my knees, sat back…

And realised that I didn’t have an internet connection. Of course. What else did I have on it? Some movies, I supposed. Probably some music. I clicked around my downloads, and froze. I reflected briefly that exorbitant textbook prices had very probably save my life.

Because a couple of months ago, I’d been very annoyed about the apparently compulsory and very important textbook that I needed to buy for uni, and turned to the less property-respecting part of the internet for help. And while I hadn’t found the textbook I needed, I had, in the way you do, found a few other interesting torrents. Which was why my laptop contained a folder named 1001.high.school.and.college.textbooks[pdf-king] .

I had a look. Physics, biology, engineering, and a smattering or other disciplines. All high school year levels and beyond.

I grinned. “Hooray for piracy,” I muttered.


	5. Physics and Chemistry

“Okay,” I explained to Glath, “so I need 240 volts, 10 amps to connect to these bits of metal on this plug here, as AC – uh, with the electrons zigzagging back and forth.”

“What are volts and amps?” he asked, crossing his front legs in what I was beginning to recognise as an inquiring gesture. Once I’d realised that Glath was way more comfortable imitating a giant mantis than a human, I’d explained that I didn’t expect him to look human just for my sake. You’d think that hearing my exact voice coming from an alien spider cloud imitating a huge mantis would be creepier than coming from one imitating a human, but it wasn’t. Nothing is creepier than an alien spider cloud talking in your exact voice while trying, and failing, to look like you.

He – I didn’t know if Glath had a single sex or gender, but the mantis he was trying so hard to emulate was male – watched patiently as I scrolled though a basic physics textbook, frowning. I’d prioritised finding a way to keep my devices charged over mere trivialities like finding out what I could eat without dying or whether it was possible to catch some sort of weird alien infection that my immune system would be powerless to resist. When my laptop died, my knowledge died with it. That laptop battery was the most important clock I was on.

“Okay,” I said eventually, “so in terms of electrons I need… hmm. What the hell is a Coulomb?”

“6.242x1018 protons,” Glath said after some internal translation rustling. “What is a proton?”

“Uh, I’m pretty sure we care about the electrons,” I mumbled. “Current is backwards because somebody guessed wrong before we knew what an electron was. If I’m reading this right.”

“What is an electron?”

“It’s… you know, an electron,” I said, waving my hand in what I was sure must be an informative manner. “The little balls whizzing around atoms. Makes electricity. Everyone knows what an electron is.”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t know about electrons, but you know their unit of measurement?”

“My information for translation is incomplete.”

“No shit.” I scrolled through the textbook some more. “Okay, an electron is the smallest subatomic particle, it has a charge of negative 1 and orbits the nucleus of the atom.”

“Oh! The [untranscribable alien clicking sound]. Did you just describe this as a particle?”

“Probably. Your expression is getting better, by the way. That sounded almost like something a human would say, without sounding like a creepy recording of something I said.”

“Thank you.”

“Okay, so one Coulomb is on amp per second, meaning...” I did some quick calculations on the back of a receipt I’d found in my glove compartment. “Does this look right to you? I haven’t done algebra since high school, so...”

Glath absorbed the receipt. “And you need this charge moving back and forth?”

“I… think so?”

“It is easy. I will make sure the correct voltage and amps are available and source the materials for you to build a device to connect the supply to your machine.”

“A socket. It’s called a socket.”

Glath rustled. “Ah. Yes. Socket.”

While Glath was off collecting materials or whatever, I noted what pages of what books I’d probably need to build the socket and started to memorise the idetails. I, with my usefulness to the ship hinging on me being a master engineer, could hardly claim not to be able to do this trivial task. Once I was sure I knew enough of the basics that anything complicated enough to need checking wouldn’t be suspicious, I addressed my second most important problem: trying not to get randomly poisoned. Food turned out to be a way more complicated matter than I thought it would be, so I started with water.

Turns out, there’s all kinds of horrible things that can kill you in water, but I doubted most of them would be a problem on the spaceship. I didn’t think there were industrial solvents being dumped into the water supply and biological infection seemed unlikely; the water on the ship would have to be sterilised.

I did wonder, vaguely, whether I might catch something off the crew or vice versa, but I’d heard Kate rant enough to know that even on Earth, just because a bacterium or virus could live in one species didn’t mean it could live in another, so the chances of me being able to catch anything from an alien were remote. Besides, I was pretty sure the crew would’ve considered that when they abducted me.

All in all, and assuming the aliens didn’t have weird chemicals that did horrible things to the body that human science had not yet encountered, there were only two things likely to be in the water that I thought I would have to worry about – plastics, and heavy metals. Both were long-term poisoners, the heavy metals slowly collecting in the body and fucking shit up, and some plastics being mildly carcinogenic. So realistically, if I didn’t manage to steal the ship and fly it back to Earth fairly quickly, I probably wouldn’t live long enough for either to be a problem anyway.

At this point, Glath returned with a small pile of wires and clips, and helped me lever off a wall panel. He showed me a wire. “The requires electrical motion – ”

“Current,” I said.

“ – current is moving through this wire.”

“Great. So, just to get this straight, there’s an electrical network in this wall.”

“Yes.”

“And flowing water, because I took a shower earlier.”

“Yes.”

“In a rotating ring. Which I assume is supplied through the non-rotating central axle, or another place rotating at a different speed.”

“Yes.”

“How is it that my species can’t seem to get past our own moon if interstellar travel is a problem solveable by people who build ships like this?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Of course you don’t, buddy, you’re not a master engineer.”

Would electricity earth in this floor I’m lying on?”

“We are quite far from Earth.”

“No, I meant that in the case of me… you know what? I’m just gonna assume the worst and try not to die. Hand me those wire cutter things and that strippy thing.”

Glath did. I prepared to cut, then a horrible thought struck me. “The electricity is off, right?”

“No.”

I blinked. “You mean this wire is live right now? And you were just gonna let me cut it? With my hands?”

“I assumed that was procedure. I am not a master engineer.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being funny or not, Glath, but if you are, that slight change on my inflection is perfect for it. Could you please have somebody shut off the electricity while I do this?”

“I will.”

Once the electricity was off, the project was pretty simple. Turns out alien wire was an awful lot like Earth wire – metal for the electricity, surrounded by some kind of rubber or plastic to stop the electricity. I cut the wire, added some more wire to each to make a cord, and ended each end of the cord with a bit of metal shaped to clip around one of the laptop charger plug’s prongs. Glath had brought me some kind of non-conductive putty that started to harden when you took it out of the packet, so I shaped a blob of that around my work, taped my two wires leading from the wall together to make a single chord, and gave Glath a thumbs-up, hoping that my hands weren’t shaking too obviously.

I then explained the meaning of a thumbs-up to Glath, so he could go and get the power turned back on.

“Okay,” I said once I’d confirmed that the socket was working, “Next problem. Water.” I pulled up a picture of the periodic table. “Anything here,” I said, circling quite a lot of the bottom of the table with my finger, “will kill me quite fast, maybe, I think, if there’s too much of it. And anything here,” I added, circling the heavy metals, “will kill me a lot slower.”

Glath reached out a long arm and poured some spiders over my laptop screen. I resisted the urge to drop the laptop or start frantically crushing spiders. The first time Glath had looked at my screen had resulted in a few crushed spiders, a terrified interpreter (letting me learn several of Glath’s body language cues for shock and terror, which I hoped never to see again), and a long, apology-laden talk about different senses in different species. Glath’s sight, as it turned out, wasn’t great; they could make out shapes through a combination of sight and a few other senses based on sound and pressure, but colour was harder. Turns out computer screens only emit three colours, none of which Glath had much luck using to discern the shape of letters or diagrams; it was far easier to simply pour himself over the surface and have his spiders compare notes.

This time, Glath briefly flowed over the screen, puled back, and said, “I do not know these symbols.”

I reread the paragraph under the periodic table. “Okay, um, so the number is how many protons, which means… those electrons we talked about before? The number on each element should be how many electrons, too, then.”

“Which number?”

“Uh, the top one. The other is atomic mass, which… for the most common isotope… nope. Not going there. Let’s stick with electrons.”

“But such a field can easily shift… I mean… the electron amount can change. Easily at any given place.”

“Hmm. Is there a chemist on the ship?”

“The filtration expert has a lot of chemical knowledge.”

“Oh, good, he’s exactly who we need for this water stuff anyway, right?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Then let’s go see the filtration expert.”

* * *

I was trying to ignore the itch in my scales.

It had been getting worse. I wanted to shed, and the Stardancer had no core tree to scrape the scales off. Some of my colleagues had started to shed anyway, pulling theirs free on whatever rough surface was available for the task, but I’m somewhat of a purist and wasn’t about to engage in such perverted nonsense. I could see why they had been tempted, though; the itch was getting distracting. Soon enough, I’d have to shed at least one layer.

A few of my colleagues had shed several, peeling off layers almost as soon as they matured. They’d had the decency to be ashamed at first, and tried to hide their habits, but we’d been in space a long time and the resulting accelerated maturity was starting to show; their wings were shrivelling and crumbling, their bellies becoming heavy with the core seeds growing inside them. At this rate, they’d be fully female before the captain ever made good on its promises and landed us.

The rest of us said nothing about the shedders, of course. After all, when we did land, we wanted people in separate stages of maturity. We wanted a few people ready to lay core seeds so that the rest of us could shed properly when the trees were strong enough. What was the point of a single-sex colony? It would be nonsense.

But to get far enough to make a colony, I had to keep everybody alive. And my scales were distracting me.

So was the thing that marched into my office behind Ceramic.

Yes, ‘office’ was a grandiose term for the small section of my people’s ring that I’d walled off to work in, but it was still mine, and I couldn’t afford to be distracted. I flicked two of my tails at the intruders to show displeasure and returned to my screens. But Ceramic was already dissolving out of its template’s shape and into a shape that more mimicked mine; four legs, four tails, two big wings. It was preparing to speak with me. I wondered whether ignoring or acknowledging them would get rid of them faster.

“Yarrow, this human needs your help,” Ceramic said, in a mixture of vocalisations and tail-gestures.

Acknowledging it was, then. I hoped it would be brief. Ceramic could never get our tail-gestures right, which garbled its language somewhat. I’d had the pleasure of talking to an ambassador colony who had used one of ours for its template for ten years, once, and the conversation had been smooth and clear all the way through. Ceramic spoke like an injured child in comparison.

“And just how can I help this...” the meaning of my words only hit me halfway through my own sentence … “human? Really? The captain actually took one?”

“You didn’t know? It wasn’t a secret.”

“I assumed the captain would change its mind!”

“The human’s been wandering around the ship.”

“I’ve been in here for days, I haven’t seen anybody on the ship!” I inspected the beast. It was a lot taller than me, but this was largely because it was balanced up on its hind legs for some reason. It was able to hold its body very straight one just two feet, with no wings or tail for balance. It appeared to be doing this because it had an electronic device cradled next to its body with one foreleg, much in the way I might carry something with a wing. It wore most of a flight suit, missing only the helmet. No… on closer inspection, it seemed to be breathing with its clearly visible mouth, meaning that it was missing its breathing apparatus, too. The parts of it that I could see were covered in smooth skin, somewhere between pale yellow and pink in colour, and fine brown filaments growing above what were presumably eyes and from the top of its head. The eye filaments were much shorter than the head filaments, which were tangled and knotted like uncombed bark fibres and hung a little lower than the human’s mouth. It was ludicrous-looking, certainly, but not dangerous. It bared its teeth at me, briefly; I decided that this couldn’t possibly be a threat, because they were clearly blunt and ineffective as weapons.

Of course, most of its body was obscured by the suit and whatever it was wearing underneath. It could be hiding all manner of natural weapons. If the story of Jupiter told us anything, it was not to underestimate humans.

Ceramic said something to the human. It didn’t change shape, but the human seemed to understand anyway, bobbing its head and saying something back.

“Charlie wants to know if anything in the sections being indicated on this chart is in the ship’s water supply in significant quantities,” Ceramic said.

Charlie. I tried pronouncing the name. With effort, I almost could. I looked at the chart. “What am I looking at?”

“It is a layout of all individual chemical elements arranged – ”

“Oh, yes, I see the pattern.” The elements were arranged by proximity to stable charge cloud counts, ordered by increasing internal charge. I had been momentarily mislead by the fact that the central columns had been removed from the table and lined up underneath it for some reason. I examined the two groups that Charlie had indicated with a long, flexible foretoe. The bottom group was largely irrelevant; most of those elements were either extremely rare, highly unstable at local conditions and wouldn’t last in water for long enough to be a problem even if they got in somehow, or already filtered out due to their danger to life aboard the ship. The second group indicated were a contamination possibility, but also filtered due to their potential danger to certain life forms. I made a note to check on those filters, in case they were more dangerous to humans than the other life aboard. I explained this to Ceramic, who flicked its wings to indicate satisfaction.

“Can I be of any further service?” I asked.

“Not right now,” Ceramic said. “Thank you.”

“Do try not to get murdered,” I advised politely.

“It’s been perfectly compliant,” Ceramic assured me. “I see nothing to indicate danger.”

“Neither did the Jupiterians.”

* * *

The filtration expert turned out to be one of the dragon people. Glath led me onto their ring in the ship (gravity and air pressure still too light for my taste, but better than the bridge) and led me through a small maze of colourful hand-woven tapestries, some anchored to make walls and some dangling to make curtains, depicting various geometric patterns that, if they had any meaning, I couldn’t interpret. Occasionally was an actual picture of a sunset or something that was probably some kind of alien animal or tree, but mostly it was lines and shapes, ranging from blocky things you’d buy for a preschooler to straight lines shot through a tapestry at random in various beautiful colours to intricate details diagrams that looked like magic demon-summoning circles from TV.

I made the mistake of paying too much attention to the tapestries and not enough to where we were going, and got lost immediately. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Glath led me under a woven curtain into the office of the filtration expert.

Said expert was one of the dragon aliens, like those I’d seen on the bridge. I’m no expert in alien body language, but as they simply refused to look at us until Glath coaxed them to start talking, somehow I don’t think they wanted us there.

Talking seemed to be a full body experience for dragons. The pair used wings, tails and voice, and probably a bunch of other stuff I didn’t notice, to have a brief conversation. It wasn’t long before the filtration expert started, and stared at me.

“He did not know you were aboard,” Glath explained.

“Oh.” This seemed like a problem to me. Wasn’t that the sort of thing the filtration guy needed to know? What if there was something in my body that wasn’t being filtered out of the water supply and could kill aliens? “Well, uh, now he does.” I gave a halfhearted smile and wave to the stocky dragon who was very openly looking me up and down. He seemed to take everything in, immediately lose interest, and turn to the problem at hand.

I could respect a guy like that.

The whole issue was resolved very quickly. Apparently those things weren’t in the water, but the filtration expert would check the filter systems to be sure. Okay then. I carefully watched how Glath and the expert moved their tails at the end of the conversation and experimentally copied the gesture with my fingers to say ‘goodbye’, but my gesture seemed to go unnoticed, so I’d probably gotten it wrong.

Glath’s translater fluttered as we left, so I kept quiet and let him assemble his sentence in peace. As we entered the shaft to the central corridor and the gravity began to drop, he said, “Does your water’s acidity need to alter chemical?”

“You mean, does it need to be a specific acidity? I… don’t think so? I mean it didn’t melt my skin off when I showered or anything, so I’m sure it’s fine.”

“Even for digestion?”

“Well water’s water, isn’t it? We can drink it from rivers and pipes and the sky and stuff so I’m sure whatever acidity it normally has is fine.” My laptop slipped from my hands in the dropping gravity; I grabbed it and did a quick search of the high school biology books I had open. “So, uh, the pH scale – that’s the scale we use for acids – has water at around 7 if it’s clean, but we can drink up to 8.5 or even higher. And apple juice is 3.3, so there doesn’t seem to be any trouble with low pH either.”

“How does this pH represent acidity?”

“Good question.” Looking that up filled in the journey back to my ring and then some, during which time I learned some extremely boring things about the importance of hydrogen and how logarithmic scales work. I summarised this for Glath.

Glath’s volume contracted briefly in what I’d started tentatively theorising was a gesture of disbelief. “You are certain of this scale?”

“Well, I dunno, that’s just what the book says.”

“That is more acidic than digestive acids!”

“Not our digestive acids,” I said. “I mean, I think they’re less potent when we’re not digesting? But on this scale, when they are, they’re around 1.5, so – ”

“There is clearly a misprint in this formula.”

“I’ll check the other books and get back to you on that.”

“An acidity that low should burn your flesh.”

“Oh, yeah, it totally does. I mean it’s fine in our stomach but if it gets out, man does it burn. I used to go to school with this girl who had an eating disorder and she’d make herself throw up and her vomit started to dissolve away the enamel on her teeth after awhile.”

Glath took a long time to translate that. When he was done, he just stared at me. At least I assumed he was staring. It’s kind of hard to tell when you’re being stared at by someone with millions of too-small-to-see eyes all over his amorphous body. His faux head stayed pointed at me, anyway.

“I’ll check the books, anyway. Let’s move onto food. I could eat a horse.”

The sense of being stared at intensified. “How would you fit it inside you? Your clothing did not look designed for expanding.”

I laughed. Glath’s spiders shifted in a sort of flinch. “No, no, it’s an expression. Exaggeration. Uh, it’s like saying something is bigger than it is, for emphasis,” I explained, to save Glath the bother of translating. The internal rustling told me that perhaps I shouldn’t have used a word as obscure as ‘emphasis’. “I just meant that I’m getting hungry.”

“I will allow you to find this information,” Glath said, heading for the shaft. Was it my imagination, or was he moving faster than his normal comfortable pace? Well, maybe faster was his normal comfortable pace. Maybe he just walked slower with me so that I could keep a comfortable pace.

“Okay, textbook,” I mumbled to myself, scrolling through pages about photosynthesis that had no relevance whatsoever to my current situation, “divulge your delicious secrets. Human’s gotta eat.”


	6. Food is Complicated, and So Is the Law

You’d be amazed how hard it is to find information about human nutrition that some random imbecile like me could understand.

Thing is, food isn’t really a problem for humans on Earth. Oh, sure, there were societies where poor people starved, and there were issues when natural disasters happened, and malnutrition was a thing, but all in all it’s actually really, really hard to starve a human. We can get energy from an insane number of things; a starving human can eat pretty much any kind of fresh meat and solve their immediate problem. A pretty wide range of plant matter could be broken down, too; an awful lot of things that would poison most animals could be broken down by our bodies.

We compensated for the lack of specialisation in our digestive systems by cooking the food first, making fire do half the digestion for us; a lot of infections and poisons were destroyed this way, too. If poison did survive the fire, we could often wash it out, or ferment it out, or spit in it and let our mouth bacteria do the work over several hours. Sure, a human could die from food-related problems – some plants were poisonous even to us, and a diet of meat could cause fatal vitamin overdose or malnutrition depending on what parts of the animals you were eating – but it was a pretty rare things. If it was biological, we’d find some way to turn it into food.

So the parts on human health in the books that I could understand, which were mostly warnings about sugar and fat and little asides about scurvy, weren’t actually all that important to my immediate problem.

I focused on the most relevant parts – human energy came from sugars, fats, and proteins. I found diagrams of these molecules. Half an hour of studying chemistry later, I was able to kind of understand what those diagrams meant, at least well enough to communicate it to Glath, and twenty minutes after that I was eating crystallised sugar off a stick. I was in space, with aliens, eating lollipops. My boys were gonna be so jealous when I told them about this.

Proteins and fats were trickier to make, Glath has explained, especially since there was so much variety in proteins – since we didn’t know what proteins would be poisonous to me, we decided to stick to the ones drawn in the books as closely as possible. Glath promised to talk to the ship’s physician about it. I didn’t think sugar would keep me going for long.

I did, in the end, go to sleep. And when I woke up, I went out to replace that bar properly.

The journey up the pole was as dizzying and unpleasant as last time, but I made myself stop and pay attention to where I was. There were stars all around, but none close enough to be called a sun. How far had we travelled from Earth? I couldn’t have been aboard the ship more than a day and a half, and that was assuming I’d slept really well in my car both times (unlikely). I’d been sure to check my science textbooks before heading out and knew that the nearest star to our own was Proxima Centauri, at 4.22 light years. I wasn’t completely sure how the maths behind perspective worked, which was a pity because that sort of thing would definitely have come up in my photography degree if I hadn’t been shanghaied, but let’s assume that the sun therefore had to be, oh… half that distance away to be star-sized instead of sun-sized. I had a hunch that it had to be further, but just saying. That would mean that we’d travelled more than two light years, and unless pop culture had lied to me, I was pretty sure that nothing could go faster than light. So something like warp speed from Star Trek must be real, I supposed.

Good for us.

I turned my attention to the ship. I probably had a chance of actually understanding the ship, or at least the parts of it visible from the end of my big 3 metre wide pole. Being extremely careful with my phone, I took several photos, as well as a short video, of the ship I was slowly rotating around. There were details I hadn’t paid much attention to before; dents and marks on the hull, like long burns. And then, in three places around the ship, something else.

Around the middle of the ship, over the top of where I knew the bridge ring to be, was a chain of little semicircular scoops cut from the hull. There was an identical chain around the ship just under where my ascent pole was, and one of the far side, just inside the other X of poles. As I watched, the ship rotated beneath me – or more accurately, I rotated around it – enough to reveal that not all of these big semicircular dents in the hull were, well, empty. Some of them had big metal balls in them, and I could see how when they were all filled they’d look like strings of giant metal 5 metre wide pearls wrapped tightly enough around the hull to press into it. But right now, only a few were filled. I couldn’t think of too many reasons for little detachable balls on the hull like that. They had to be escape pods, strategically spaced for good access in any disaster; a ring on the bridge where the staff would be spending a lot of time, and a ring at either end in case the ship got blown in half or something. Had to be. With most of them missing… previous crew, maybe? This was a stolen ship, after all. That didn’t matter right now.

I only needed one.

I filmed the night sky for a little while, trying to keep the camera as still as possible. Maybe I could figure out where we were from the stars, or something. It didn’t seem likely, but hey, what did I know?

With a few minutes of ship and star footage, I replaced the bar properly (being sure to film in there too) and returned to the inside of the ship, alien arm in my belt.

“I want to take this arm to its owner,” I told Glath.

He reached for it. “I can do it.”

“No. I want to.”

“Why? He is not one of yours.”

“He was the engineer, wasn’t he?”

Glath seemed to accept this. He led me to a ring I didn’t have access to on my own, one with the same air pressure and gravity as the bridge. I stepped out of the access shaft into a world of praying mantis people.

The light was reddish and even, cast from a glowing ceiling and just a little dimmer than I preferred. Unlike my ring, which mostly had storage boxes and my car, somebody had taken great pains to make this one look like a planet; the floor under my feet was covered in something springy and a little damp, a blue-green, patchy carpet of moss. Or something like moss, anyway. Tall treelike things stood here and there, with big straight trunks and large, transparent gelatinous sacks on top of them. Piles of rocks, or at least something that looked very much like rocks but for all I knew might be plaster or something, were dotted here and there. Resting against the largest rock pile was the remains of the dead engineer, stripped of his space suit.

The winged mantises wandering about – mantises in all sorts of sizes and colours, with slightly different heads and hands and feet, from the very thin bright red ones that seemed to have spindly fingers to the dumpy little white ones whose arms ended in shovel blades – were mostly ignoring him. But occasionally, one would wander over, inspect the body, dig a bit of flesh out of him and eat it, before moving on.

Gross.

I walked over and laid his arm gently in his lap. At the disturbance, one of the gems fell off his face – a disk of emerald, or at least something green, about half the size of my palm. I picked it up. It was slippery with blood, and a small fragment of mantis flesh clung to it.

I had no idea what the mantises were made of. I didn’t know what I was made of. They might be poisonous to me. They might kill my liver, or make me blind, or grow into mantis babies in my stomach for all I knew. I pushed those thoughts aside, stuck the fragment of flesh on my tongue, and forced myself to swallow.

The blood tasted a bit like thousand island dressing, which wasn’t too bad with the crab meat taste of raw alien mantis flesh.

I slipped the chunk of emerald into my belt while no one was looking. I don’t really know why. It seemed right, somehow. Mantis people remember the dead with cannibalism; humans remember the dead with mementos. At least, in my culture we did. Maybe some humans had cannibal funerals in some countries, I wouldn’t know.

Come to think of it, maybe the mantis ritual was regional and in some places they did different –

My pointless musing was cut off by the sound of a shrill whistle. I couldn’t tell where it came from, but every mantis I could see immediately leapt into action, rushing off to various points out of sight.

“What’s happening?” I asked Glath. His spiders, who tended to drift a bit around the edges of his form and make him look fuzzy, had clumped together to form a very firm, very rigid mantis shape at the sound of the alarm. This meant that they took up rather less space than normal, making Glath look about my size.

“A ship has been found,” he told me. “We are preparing for battle if it cannot be outrun.”

“Outrun? Aren’t we pirates? Aren’t we supposed to board them and take all their stuff?”

“If we can fight without damage, yes. But the health of the ship is important. They must have weak weapons and good stuff. This ship looks to be a military vessel, perhaps, in which case they will attempt to capture or execute us.”

“Okay, what do I do?”

“Go to your quarters. Somebody will alert you when the threat has passed.”

Right, of course, I was an engineer. Fighting wasn’t my job. I wasn’t about to argue.

One thing the Stardancer lacks is windows. This meant that I had no idea what was going on for the million years or so that I paced around my ring of the ship. I wasn’t tired. I was hungry, but not hungry enough to eat another load of pure sugar. I didn’t need a shower and even if I had there was no way in hell I was gonna be caught naked in a spaceship battle. And I’d definitely done enough studying for one day.

I put the chunk of emerald on the dashboard in my car. I spent rather longer arranging it than the task really merited. Still, nothing was happening that I could tell, and nobody had come to give me the all-clear. I replaced the air tank in my space suit with a full one and set the valve in the old one to fill from the air in the room like Glath had shown me before sending me out. (Well, technically, the tanks were always full; I was emptying the carbon dioxide and adding oxygen. Glath had tried to explain how the filter worked but even if we’d had enough common language I wouldn’t have cared.) Then I went exploring the crates that had been stored in my ring.

For alien cargo, they turned out to be pretty boring. Rope. Cloth. Bricks of something that might be some kind of alien bread but that I didn’t want to try in case it turned out to be drain cleaner. Round disks of all sizes, some smaller than my hand and some almost as tall as me, that after some thought I decided were probably filters for pipes of water or air or something. The rope and cloth seemed pretty strong, so there was that. The rope turned out to be some kind of woven metal. Behind some crates, I found a bunch of big metal panels that, if stood up on the floor with a little lever pushed, held to the floor somehow and became immovable metal walls without any further support needed. Cool. Maybe I could build myself a little cubby house.

A jolt threw me to the floor. My car, a few metres away, slid several inches.

Was that normal? Did that mean the battle wasn’t going well? They’d win, right? I mean, we were on an absolute junk ship led by someone who thought that abducting me and offering me a bunch of definitely illegal foreign money would solve their problem of a previous engineer being too stupid to avoid getting crushed in a huge fan and I hadn’t seen anything on the outside of the ship that looked much like a weapon but…

Another jolt, larger this time. If I’d bothered to get up from the first one, I might have hurt myself. Something fell in the back seat of my car with a tinkle. Camera equipment. Fuck, the library was gonna charge me for that.

Hang on. How hadn’t that broken when they’d picked me up in the first place? They would’ve had to put the car, and me, in the ship… either in Earth gravity, or via one of the escape pods or something, which meant we’d be in zero gravity when they started the ring rotating… no matter how I thought about the problem, I couldn’t think of a way to do it gently without an awful lot of fuss and presumably some kind of expensive scifi tech. How much effort had they put into not breaking my stuff? How much had I cost to abduct?

I didn’t have much time to think about this before something else fell inside the car and broke. At least my phone and laptop were safe. Did this mean the battle wasn’t going very well? Curse the lack of windows!

Should I… should I be doing something?

What would even happen if we lost, anyway? Glath had said capture or execution if it was military, but maybe they were just other pirates. Or merchants who didn’t want to be boarded. Even if it was military, what did that mean for me? Would I get a chance to make my case, to explain that I’d just been abducted and wasn’t here by choice and hadn’t even done anything yet except fix a motor? Maybe they’d let me go. Maybe they’d help me get home.

Was that how it worked? I was pretty sure humans didn’t have… citizenship, or whatever, in the big galactic government that was chasing us. Or maybe there was more than one. Maybe there was a war, and that’s why there were military ships out here. Anyway, if legal rights were a thing with them, I probably didn’t have them. Were there protocols for showing up as a member of a non-spacefaring species? Did I want to find out? Whose side should I be on, here?

I mean, this ship didn’t have much to offer. The conditions could’ve been worse, but captive labour until death by horrific accident and/or space battle didn’t seem ideal for me, and I had no real feasible plan to get home. Rescue, I reasoned, gave me a better chance. It had to. I just had to play the victim I was, and hope our attackers didn’t shoot on sight. I owed the crew of the Stardancer absolutely nothing. Captain Nemo seemed like a jerk. Glath’s whole job regarding me was to make sure I knew how to be a good little slave and knew what needed fixing. The filtration specialist… well, he hadn’t even known I’d been aboard at first, but he was still part of the crew that thought it was okay to go around doing shit like this. They could face the penalty for their crimes, and it wasn’t my responsibility to protect them from that. It was my responsibility to protect myself long enough to get home to my family.

Another jolt, the biggest yet. Another alarm sounded, this one much shriller and louder. My car slid almost a metre across the floor this time. The piece of emerald I’d taken from the dead engineer’s face dropped from the window and skidded across the floor in front of me.

Ugh, fuck.

Fuck this whole ship of arseholes who held touching if disgusting cannibal funerals for their dead and who spoke with iridescent wings and tails while clearly trying to get back to their actual goddamn job and who somehow managed to look adorable when startled despite being a cloud of alien spiders.

Fuck it all.

I shoved the emerald in my toolbelt and put my oxygen tank and helmet back on. After a moment, I picked up some of the metal rope, because a tether as short as the one on my suit was, with my recent luck, bound to be just a little bit too short for anything I wanted to do. Then I made my way to the bridge ring.

The door was locked to me. I couldn’t get in. Made sense, I supposed; you didn’t want non-military getting in your way and fucking shit up in a combat situation. Well, joke’s on you, Captain Nemo, because that just meant I had to get in the way and fuck shit up more. If I couldn’t find out what was going on by asking, I was going to have to look. I made sure the metal rope was secure around my waist and headed for the filter room, and the airlock on the other side of it. I was really starting to loathe open space.

But some stupid emotional part of me, for some absurd reason, hated whoever was endangering the lives of my dangerous criminal abductors even more.


	7. Space Battles are Boring

There weren’t even any lasers.

I suppose there was excitement, in its way. For instance, as the airlock opened into space it suddenly occurred to me that if the ship jolted again before my safety line was attached, it could simply jerk me out into space and leave me flailing just out of reach of the ship to slowly run out of air. That certainly got my heart racing while I quickly tied myself to the safety rail and began climbing one of the metal poles for a better view. And then, while musing about why my normal safety cord was so short when the ten-metre cable I’d replaced it with gave me so much room, I realised that this probably had something to do with the longer rope’s likelihood of getting tangled on something in zero gravity, and had some pretty vivid visions of the sorts of things that could happen to me if the rope tangled on a non-moving part of the ship while I was tied to the moving pole. That, in its own way, was pretty exciting. The actual ship battle? Not so much.

There was, so far as I could tell, the Stardancer, and one other ship. It was hard to tell from the outside, but the other ship looked a lot better designed than ours. It was smaller, for one thing, and had a distinct front and back and had rockets of some kind placed in clearly useful places; arrays near the back angled for turning and acceleration, and a couple of large, carefully spaced ones at the front for brakes. It was vaguely round in shape, like an egg; the sort of shape that didn’t look like it’d break cleanly in half if you slammed something into its side. The egg shape was obscured by all sorts of tacked-on contraptions that were probably weapons or sensors or something, but I suspected they weren’t vital to the ship. This looked like a ship that didn’t have multiple rotating parts inside it for something as minor as variable gravity. It looked like a ship that you could probably move from room to room without going through rotating airlock shafts. It looked like a ship that you couldn’t render an entire section of completely inaccessible with a little damage to such a shaft. It looked like a ship with sensible access points to the outside – I could already see two external doors just on the front, which was the external access count for out entire ship unless you counted the escape pods.

It looked, in short, like a ship that was actually designed to move about in, and occasionally fight in, space.

Still didn’t have windows, though. Maybe I was overestimating the value of being able to see where you were going in something as big and empty as space.

The actual combat was… careful. There was, as I said, no laser fire. Or big metal torpedoes, for that matter. Or suited aliens on rocket-powered space bikes carrying big guns. What there were, were clamps. Or grappling hooks, I guess. They were for grappling, anyway.

Something would happen to our ship, where it would feel staticky and start to look kind of blue. Then our pursuers would fire giant grappling clamp things at the four big poles forming the X at the back (side? Bottom? Front?) of our ship, the very X I was clinging to. The X of poles would stop spinning for a moment (which nearly sent me flying into space dangling on my tether the first time it happened while I was climbing), or spin a bit faster, so that the grapples missed, usually clanging off the poles. This sudden change in pole movement would throw off the rotation of the centre of the ship, which I supposed must have been the jerks I’d felt inside the ship, and the bluish hue would fade, then start to build again while the enemy reeled in their grapples and aimed for another shot.

So apparently we were trying to charge a weapon or a shield or an engine or something, and they were trying to grab us when we did, and every time we evaded the grapple we had to start charging all over again. But we had nothing to attack with, and all they had to do was keep reeling their grapples in and shooting again. Eventually, they would get lucky.

I inspected the front of their ship again, with fresh perspective. The grapples were evenly spaced around the sides, with an external door in the centre, so… were they intending to board us? To pull our airlocks together and march soldiers inside? Was that a thing they could do? The fact that they were using grapples instead of any of the several pointier things on the ship made it clear that they wanted us alive. And unless we fought back in some way, they were going to get us. What was Captain Nemo doing? Just hoping they’d eventually give her enough time to charge up all the way? Hoping their tethers would tangle up or something? Why weren’t we doing anything? We didn’t have external weapons that I could see, but we had to have soldiers, right? We were a pirate ship!

Well, we had me. And I was an engineer now, apparently, and I might not be armed but I had a belt full of tools. Which left me with two questions.

Was the distance between our two ships shorter than the length of my new tether?

And all those things that looked tacked onto the outside of the egg-shaped ship… just how tacked-on were they?

I checked, very carefully, the knots securing my tether to both myself and the Stardancer. Then I gripped the safety rail and waited for the grapples to fire.

They did. The metal pole I clung to stopped suddenly; I gripped hard, struggling no to slip off. A grappled clanged off the pole, far above me. The pole started moving again as the enemy started reeling in their grapples.

I aimed.

I jumped.

Traditionally, I’m pretty sure a pirate is supposed to swing between ships on a rope with a cutlass between their teeth. I couldn’t do this, obviously. I had breathing apparatus in my teeth. And I wouldn’t have been able to take my helmet off to insert the cutlass anyway. And of course I didn’t have a cutlass. Also, that seemed to me like a great way to faceplant into something and cut your face open on your own sword.

I did leap very dramatically, though. And I yelled “Yaaar, maties!”, even though I was in space with no radio equipment and nobody could hear me.

I fell towards the enemy ship, faster than I’d intended, and grabbed wildly at a random piece of jutting metal. My hand slipped off and I slammed into the ship, bouncing off, and for a horrifying moment I forgot about my tether and wondered if I was going to float away forever and die in the void. But no, no, I had my tether, and so far as I could tell the impact hadn’t torn my suit, and just as I was calming myself down I flew past a grapple cord, grabbed, and caught it. The cord was about as thick as my arm; I wrapped my legs around it and tugged on it to pull myself in and get some slack, then tied the biggest knot I could in it before it retracted all the way. I figured that if I could knot it and stop it retracting, it couldn’t be fired again.

Unfortunately, the ship was not to be undone by a mere tangled cord. The hole through which the cord retracted was wider than my knot, and kept pulling it up. Okay, fine. Plan B. I let the cord carry me all the way to the ship, found something that protruded, and grabbed on with my knees.

Now, how much could I do before they noticed me and found a way to get rid of me? I’d better work fast.

I inspected the grapple firing mechanism for anything that could be removed from the outside. The reel of cord was protected inside a metal case, but the actual firing and aiming parts needed to be able to move, and so were protected by what looked to be rubber flaps. I moved them aside easily. The mechanism itself was a complicated construction of levers and axles and things that I had no hope of understanding. That didn’t matter; it wasn’t like I was there to fix it.

I inspected my tools. None of them were designed to be held by human hands, but human hands are remarkably good at holding pretty much anything, so that wasn’t a problem. Some wrenches. A small pick with a safety pocket on the tip. Some other tools I couldn’t identify, but seemed to have a power source – best not to fuck with those until I learned what they were for.

Some bolts were visible on the grapple firing mechanism. I started undoing them. It was surprisingly easy. My selection of spanners didn’t seem to fit all of them, but I did what I could, then selected my heaviest wrench and slammed it into what was left, sending bent metal bits everywhere and threatening to send me flying away from the ship every time I forgot that I didn’t have gravity to hold me down. Fine, that was probably broken enough; time for grapple number two. I crawled along the ship, pushing myself from protrusion to protrusion, breaking anything obviously breakable on the way.

And that, it seemed, was when the ship noticed me.

Well, they fired their grapples again, and the one I’d wrecked failed to fire. And then they seemed to notice me. The ship braked, suddenly, almost throwing me, then spun one way, then the other. They didn’t spin too violently; they were trying to retract their grapples, after all. I held on bravely, and was feeling pretty damn pleased with myself until a simple physical fact I’d completely forgotten about came back to hit me around the waist.

The ship I was clinging to had braked. The ship I was tied to with a long metal cord had not.

The momentum of the Stardancer yanked me off our pursuer, and I grabbed wildly, instinctively, and found myself tangled in a grapple cord. I didn’t have time to imagine what would happen to me if I couldn’t extricate myself before that cord went taut; I clamped heavily down on the urge to flail wildly while screaming and carefully unwrapped myself, only to find that it was in fact two grapple cords.

I had a few seconds free. I tied them together. Let their retraction system deal with that.

It couldn’t. The cords retracted until they were pulled tight across the ship. I watched as the cords were released, then picked up by some kind of robot arm on the bottom of the ship while new grapples emerged, ready to fire. Fuck. I didn’t have time to curse this for too long, though, because I was becoming aware of something glowing blue behind me.

I turned my head, which of course sent my whole body into a slow spin. The Stardancer was very, very blue. My work had bought the captain enough time to charge whatever she was charging, and I had the sudden, urgent idea that when whatever was about to happen did happen, I’d be a lot better off inside the ship than outside it.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I yanked on my tether, which pulled me very fast towards the Stardancer. I was getting used to the fact that I always seemed to move faster than intended toward walls in space, so I probably would’ve been okay if I wasn’t also spinning. Yanking on the cord had only made me spin faster. I rolled against the ship, over the airlock, my body thankfully passing through the space it needed to pass through to open said airlock. I tugged on the rope to yank myself back towards the airlock and pulled myself in. There. Fine.

Except that the airlock wasn’t closing. My tether was in the way.

There was no way that I had time to go back out and untie it. The tether was wrapped in several sight loops around my body from the roll. With shaking, gloved hands, I yanked at the knot around my waist, then pushed the coils down over my hips as the ship grew brighter and brighter blue. My arse was in the way. Less space sugar for me. I dragged the coils of rope down, ignoring the bruised they were going to leave on my hands and every part of my lower body they snagged on, then kicked the rope out into space.

The ship glowed brighter.

The airlock closed.

Something clanged against the ship.

I had a sudden moment of the worst vertigo in my entire life. I thought zero gravity was vertigo turned up to eleven, but this was that all over again. I mean, if zero gravity was one, then this would… like, if it was a logarithmic scale like pH and normal vertigo was one and zero gravity was two and I thought that was the highest it could ever be but this suddenly introduced me to three… except that the pH scale is upside down so…

Look, fuck, it was really, really unpleasant, okay? I would have thrown up, except my stomach muscles seemed to have forgotten how to move.

And then I was on my knees. Shaking. In a partially repressurised airlock. Slowly drifting up from the part I’d arbitrarily decided to designate the floor, because of course the airlock wasn’t spinning, so there was no gravity.

Trying to figure out what the hell I’d just done.

And why.

* * *

Queen Tatik, Slightly Disputed Ruler of the Out-Western Aljik Empire, disengaged from the neural interface for a few moments to centre her mind and make sure she wasn’t misprocessing things. Then she plugged back in and read the report again.

It hadn’t changed.

She was reasonably certain that captain Etk wasn’t deceiving her. He had never given her any reason to doubt his loyalty, and if the rogue Princess had something that could turn him, that in itself would be something more concerning than the report she had just read.

The report queued in her mind was the best case scenario. That was a worrying thought.

The best case scenario was that the Stardancer had acquired human crew, and that at least some of that crew had been sent against the Lightbeam.

Perhaps Etk was mistaken. Perhaps he wasn’t certain what a human looked like, and the being was something else. But, no; Etk had served on Jupiter. He had to have some idea of what they looked like. He’d been present when the Princess had taken her current ship; that was why he’d wanted to chase her. It had been personal.

Unless she had gotten to him then? Had he defected, and requested the mission so that there would be no actual pursuit of her? No, no… he wasn’t the only one chasing her, and Tatik had learned early in her career that the answers were never as simple as that. She had to trust the report. The Stardancer had been cornered, desperate, in the correct area of space, and badly in need of soldiers. If anyone was going to do something so incredibly stupid as pick up a contingent of human military, it would be the rogue Princess.

She would have killed any underling for saying so, but Queen Tatik was forced to admit, in her private moments, that the Princess was Queen Anta’s great-granddaughter in a way that she herself never was. Tatik and the Princess might be sisters, but they were hardly similar. Only one of them carried the lightning spirit of Anta, the revered founder of their empire, and it wasn’t Tatik herself. She was not a Queen who was destined to do great, radical, galaxy-changing things. She had never intended to be. Her goal, her duty, was to hold her empire together, safe and stable, and someday pass it along to her daughters.

Her rogue sister, though… how fortunate for everyone that she had lost, even if she were too stubborn to admit it. With all her clever little tricks, Tatik supposed that she shouldn’t be surprised by this latest development. That trick with stealing the Jewel and fleeing before the regency fight was even over… how many legal loopholes was she using to stay alive? That thing with the ambassador colony who had found its way into their court; most tolerated the presence of ambassadors, but who deliberately seduced their templates just so that the ambassadors could be put to use? And that trick for how she’d come into possession of her latest ship…

All possible things, of course; they had to be, they’d been done. But what sort of person thought to do them? It was as if she couldn’t even see the walls and barriers of proper conduct, and because she couldn’t see them, she walked right through them… and surprisingly often, found that they didn’t exist. It was the sort of attitude that Anta had used to build an empire. It was the sort of attitude that the rogue would use to break it.

But humans? That was going too far. The big difference, Tatik decided, between the rogue and Anta was that Anta accepted that personal ambition was a tool for securing the future, whereas the rogue seemed quite happy to let the galaxy burn around her so long as she wasn’t in the fire. Only a person like that would enlist human military in this fight. Only a person like that would put everyone in danger to save their own miserable life.

Couldn’t her followers see that? Was that really the power they wanted to bet on? Or perhaps that was the point… perhaps they knew that there were things that would make Tatik back down, but never the rogue. Perhaps that was why they expected her to win, even thought Tatik was clearly on top.

Perhaps they mistook Tatik’s caution for an inability to make sacrifices.

Tatik wanted to execute the rogue herself, as custom demanded… but it was getting too dangerous, now. She was going to have to choose another route. A route that would cost her socially, and cost the whole empire physically, more than anybody but a select few of her very trusted servants would ever know. Most of them didn’t know the whole story, didn’t know what she was actually sacrificing… but there was no choice any more.

Queen Tatik altered the live capture order for the Stardancer. Within hours, every military vessel in the empire would have their orders to kill the rogue Princess on sight.

* * *

We waited, tense, in the access shafts, ready to spring into the central corridor and surround the invaders. That we would be boarded was, at this point, a forgone conclusion. Our current ship had very few external weapons, and most of what we did have had been damaged when we captured it. Not that they would have been of any use against a military ship, anyway.

I was getting the impression from my fellow warriors that we wouldn’t be much use against the military, either.

I shared the access shaft to the control ring with two other soldiers. My Template, Kit, was trying not to look nervous as he leaned against the shaft wall supported only by his hind legs, ready to spring upward. In his forelimbs he gripped a pair of shell knives, the traditional weapon of the dohl caste, made from the abnormally strong wing carapaces of dohl who had gone before. His, I knew, had come from one of the previous Queen’s most favoured dohl. A source of honour and pride.

He was holding them far too tightly.

If his brave act wasn’t fooling me, it certainly wasn’t fooling Gekt, our other companion. Whereas the dohl were technically a warrior caste but often acted more as attendants (they were almost identical to engineers, by lightning, from their mid-ranged size and pale blue carapace to their small front claws; some non-aljik species couldn’t even tell the difference), tahl like Gekt were built for battle and battle alone. The huge, bright red claws on her forelimbs could slice right through a joint with one snip, and they were practically superfluous under her powerful mandibles and the sheer weight of her giant, yet disconcertingly agile, frame. Even her mid and hind limbs, normally used only for walking and climbing in most aljik castes, were battle-ready, covered as they were in thick plating and very sharp hooks. The Princess only had three tahl in her entire force.

If the ship chasing us was, as the design suggested, sent by the Queen, then it could very well be filled almost entirely with tahl. What did they need; an engineer and a captain, perhaps? That still left room for a lot of tahl.

Not that Gekt looked remotely nervous. Perhaps tahl aren’t capable of feeling fear. Kit and I definitely were, though, and I was having trouble keeping my peripheral community members under control. We tensed. We waited.

We moved.

Not us, in the shaft. Us, the Stardancer. The ship slipped into a dash, then out of it again, smoothly and without any obvious complications.

“How long were we dashing?” Gekt asked. Tahl tended to lack the capacity to prioritise important details.

“Did we lose them?” Kit asked, being somewhat more competent at that particular skill.

“How did the captain find enough time to initiate the dash?” I asked. Like the other two questions, nobody had an answer for this. None of us knew anything. We hadn’t received orders to leave our posts, and no enemy had boarded, but this wasn’t what was supposed to happen. We shouldn’t have had time for a proper post-lightspeed dash. They should have boarded; if they hadn’t, then that meant they must have succeeded in the grapple and decided to simply tow us in a post-lightspeed dash to the nearest base. If we sat waiting for a boarding party that wasn’t coming then soon it would be too late to escape. Were we safe, or not?

“We should consult the Princess,” I said.

“You go,” Gekt replied.

“I will protect our Princess!” I insisted.

“How?”

My community milled at this rudeness, but I didn’t let it show in my posture. I tolerated the Princess using my abilities to turn me into a translator; I could hardly allow such insults from her and then be angry at her court for acting the same. Besides, she was right, and our lives were more important than my feelings.

“I’ll go,” Kit said. “Gth can stay here.”

“No,” I said. “You hold position, Kit. Do not die.”

“I’d never inconvenience you in such a way,” he replied.

I headed into the control ring. The Princess finished the cooldown sequence and disengaged from the ship’s piloting system as I approached.

“Somebody check on the human,” she commanded, almost before her midlimbs hit the ground. “Not you,” she added as I headed back for the shaft.

“You… think the human is a threat?” I asked.

“Possibly. Comms, advise the warriors to hold positions in the shafts until I hear back from the human’s ring. Send an atil.”

We had plenty of the small, speedy members of the atil caste. The Princess might be trying to look nonchalant, but she was sending somebody disposable and holding the ship’s crew in conflict-ready positions.

“The human is possibly a threat?” I pressed.

“What happened?” a passing atil asked. (I didn’t recognise who it was. All atil look basically identical, being only about a quarter of the Princess’ height and pale cream in colour with no remarkable physical features. They even decorated their faces almost identically, using only flint, so using facial jewels to identify them was unreliable at best.)

“The engineer, despite being ordered to quarters, left them mid-conflict, travelled outside the ship, and as far as I can make out from the data available, seems to have leapt through space over to the Lightbeam.”

“They can leap?!” someone asked.

“They can,” I confirmed. “I’ve seen Charlie do it, to move about when the gravity is too low.”

“What’s going on?” one of the drakes at the comms asked. I changed shape to translate.

“Once it made the leap,” the Princess said, “the Lightbeam started to encounter difficulties and we were able to initiate the dash. Right before we did so, something using the human’s biosignature entered the ship, lingered in the airlock for a short while, and then went to their ring.”

“So either the human defected to the Queen Whatsername and we have an army planted on board,” the comms drake said once I’d translated, “or our engineer decided to jump into battle, somehow took down a military vessel, and then just went back to its assigned location hoping the captain wouldn’t notice?”

“Which is more worrying, do you think?” the atil asked.

“That probably depends on the strength of the army gathered in the first scenario,” I said.

Another atil scampered over, one of the few I recognised due to the unusually shaped bit of flint stuck just above her right mandible – Lln. She briefly opened and closed her wing cases to the Princess in respect.

“The human is in its quarters, Princess,” Lln said. “I think it’s alone. I… I didn’t do a thorough inspection but...”

“You did well,” the Princess said. “That is all I wanted to know.”

“It didn’t follow you?” I asked.

“I locked it in,” the Princess said.

“Princess,” I said as reasonably as I could, “you have a human on board, a master engineer who just defied orders to take down a military vessel, and you locked it up?”

“… Good point. But we can’t have it wander about the ship.”

My community danced within me. I carefully kept my irritation out of my posture. Impulsivity and inventiveness were our Princess’ greatest strengths and they were what drew most of her court to her, but her judgement was not always completely reliable.

“Please, Princess, let me speak to it.”

“It has no way to leave the ring,” the Princess said placatingly.

“It just leapt through space, did it not?”

“It has nothing to cut through the hull.”

“So you want to leave it there until it gets angry? It just saved us, didn’t it? It is my opinion, Princess, that we should not encourage it to change its mind.”

“… Very well. You may speak with it. Take no risks. You are too valuable.”

I headed for Charlie’s ring. Charlie was out of its space suit, lying on top of its vehicle, staring up at something I couldn’t see. It briefly looked at me as I entered, then returned to monitoring the ceiling.

“Hi, Glath. Are we safe?”

“We are not being pursued,” I said carefully.

“Good to know. Anyone die?”

“Not that I know of.”

Charlie bobbed its head; a gesture, I had come to learn, of agreement or acknowledgement. This was probably acknowledgement.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Bruises, mostly. You know me in zero grav, clumsy as shit. Freaking out a bit but that’s kind of the norm for me these days, you know. This is a slave ship, isn’t it?”

“… what?”

“Before it was liberated by this completely free and not-at-all-coerced crew, I mean.”

I quickly translated the new words. “Why do you ask?”

“It seems obvious, I guess. I mean, I thought it was just so badly designed, right? Power and water’s all… not self-contained, but sectioned up for each ring. Way too many moving parts. There are a billion little potential faults that can cut access to an entire ring, and all these internal locks slow everything down. Great if you want lots of different gravities and atmospheres and stuff, but I just couldn’t get over how shitty the ship design was.”

“You think the Stardancer is poorly designed?”

“Of course it isn’t. It was built by people who can travel through fucking space. So it can’t be that it’s bad at such basic stuff, right? It’s not bad at being able to properly supply areas or travel about the ship or ensure the safety of the crew. It’s good at being able to cut and control supplies, and limit movement around the ship, and easily eliminate problematic passengers. Yeah? You said it was for delivering goods, but you never told me those goods were fucking people.”

“You are… partly correct,” I admitted, once my translation was concluded. “Except that I lied about it being a delivery ship of any kind.”

“What was it?”

“A prison ship.”

“A space prison?” Charlie twisted its head to face me and flared its eyelids. “You were all prisoners? You overpowered the guards or something?”

“Ah, no. We took the ship by force.”

“You killed the prisoners?”

“No. Some joined the crew.”

“And the others? Dead?”

“Not unless they made extremely poor decisions in their escape attempts.”

Charlie tipped its head back and barked loudly. I recognised the sound as laughter, although sharper and more monotone than usual. “The escape pods. You just… emptied a prison?”

“We needed a distraction.”

Charlie bared its teeth. I recognised the gesture as friendly – a smile, it was called – but some of the appropriate muscle groups were slow to respond. From what I had observed of Charlie thus far, this appeared to be a layered communication indicating a conscious will without sincerity – that is, Charlie was telling me that it was not happy, but was making a friendly overture on purpose. “That is so irresponsibly awesome. It wasn’t full of rapists or murderers or anything, was it?”

I attempted to translate, but some of Charlie’s words lacked necessary context. I gave up. “There were… political prisoners, and… dangerous thinkers.”

“Oh. Good. Yeah, great work.”

This approval of unleashing dangerous thinkers and political activists on the galaxy seemed sincere. I considered asking Charlie what was behind the feeling, but decided against it. After all, it might tell me.

“Do you need anything?” I asked.

“Not unless you’ve got food I can eat. I’d appreciate knowing why everyone’s shit-scared of me, though.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Charlie pushed its brows closer together. “Are you fucking serious? Because if this is more mess-around-and-hope-the-human-drops-the-subject, I am not in the fucking mood. You’re going to tell me people aren’t scared of me?”

“How could you tell?”

“How could I tell? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Yeah, I’m just some rube from a technologically primitive planet; I get that. I know you have to simplify everything or whatever but how fucking stupid do you actually think I am, Glath? Do you honestly think I can’t tell when Captain Nemo steps back if I raise my voice, or how the filter dragon double-takes when you tell him who I am, or how you… okay, look, I am sorry about the whole computer thing and attacking you there, I overreacted, that wasn’t cool – but you flinch back like I’m about to go on a murderous rampage any time I say something that surprises you in any way. I told you there was acid in my stomach and you flinched. And you think I didn’t see that little white bugger come in here, take one look at me, and run for his fucking life? Seriously, Glath – you brought me here to fix space ships. Why did you abduct me if you thought I was that much of an idiot? Look, you’re freaking out right now! I can see it!”

My posture was an exact imitation of a relaxed dohl. “What kind of sense are you using?” I asked. “It could not be pheremones, with our species differences.”

“I can use my fucking eyes, Glath!”

“Impossible,” I said. “Not only do I look perfectly relaxed, I am not even imitating a member of your – ” I froze as a new thought hit me. It was difficult to think when my community was so excited, so putting my thoughts together took some focus.

“Oh great, dramatic soap opera pausing. Where did you even learn that? Do alien spiders have soaps?”

“You knew I was uncomfortable.”

“I don’t know when you’re referring to but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen you comfortable approximately never. So probably.”

“You told me that I didn’t have to imitate one of your kind to speak with you. ‘You can be the big mantis thing if it makes you more comfortable,’ you said. I assumed that you were just telling me that your species is primarily auditory, but how did you know that I was uncomfortable?”

Charlie briefly pushed its eyelids together. “You’re actually fucking serious, aren’t you? You’re freaked out that I can pay attention in a simple interaction? Really?”

“I was not exhibiting human signs of discomfort,” I pressed. “I did not know them. I – ”

“You’re not fucking special, Glath!” Charlie snapped. “Believe it or not, a colony of flying spiders is not that difficult a concept for my poor feeble primitive Earth mind to grasp! You think that because I’m not part of a hive mind, I can’t do basic logical deduction? Look at you! Your spiders are all over the fucking place! Now, you’re trying to hold the basic shape of a mantis who’s just chilling out, I think, but since they never chill out if I’m there maybe I’m wrong… but you’re all buzzing around at the edges. I’m guessing whatever, uh… whatever brain control you have is near the middle, right? And it’s a proximity thing. ‘Cause that time I went through you, the spiders on me stopped moving until the rest of you came and picked them up. So I hate to burst your bubble, mysterious spider interpreter, but literally anyone in the entire fucking galaxy could read your emotions by just watching what your outside spiders are trying to do.”

“You, an engineer, reasoned through all of this?”

“I didn’t even think about it until explaining it right now. I didn’t need to. It’s fucking obvious.”

“And the others?” I pressed. “You mentioned that they’re afraid, too. How could you tell? How did you learn to read the emotions of other species so quickly?”

“Haven’t you basically learned my language in about two days? How can you possibly be having trouble with this?”

“I am an ambassador colony. We are imitators. You have no means to simulate another shape and I have observed no imitative behaviours from you. You have no method of learning the body language of other species.”

“Yeah, and if someone contemplates how the cold starlight makes them pine for their long lost love, I’m probably not going to pick that up. But fight-or-flight is pretty fucking basic. Weapons go up, bodies go down, people move back or try to look big if they can. It doesn’t matter if you got hands or hackles or little kitty fangs or giant alien mandibles, it’s the same fucking equation.”

“What are kitty fangs?”

“Cats. Adorable. You’d love them, I’ll show you one if we ever stop by Earth, it’ll probably try to kill you for fun. Jesus, Glath, that was a joke, I’m not going to murder you. For fuck’s sake. I can’t do anything at all without terrifying everyone. What did I do to cause this panic?”

“Nothing.”

“Really? You and Mr White Alien Mantis are extra freaked out after our little space battle for no reason? The ship’s just experiencing residual fear from almost getting caught, I suppose? Nothing to do with anything I did?”

“They are not afraid of what you did. They are… afraid of what you might do.”

“They?”

“We,” I admitted.

“Why? All I did was take a look, see a problem, and fix it. It wasn’t that big a deal. What precedent are you guys all working off? What did your last abductee do? Wait. What did the last human do?”

“You are the first human to ever board the Stardancer.”

“I don’t care which ship it was on, Glath. I don’t care which bunch of aliens did it or why. I want to know what happened with the last human abductee.”

“It is not something that we should talk about.”

Charlie stood up and stepped very close to me, so close that it was difficult for much of my colony to easily sense its face. Its breath on my wings was slow and steady. “Glath. Mate. You hear this thing I’m doing with my voice? How I’m making it all low in pitch?”

“Yes.”

“This is what we call a ‘threatening’ tone. Humans use it to intimidate each other. I’m using it to tell you that I’m too hungry and tired and pissed off to deal with your shit. You understand? Are we communicating clearly here?”

“… Yes.”

“Then what are you scared of?”

“You just admitted to threatening me.”

“So the fuck what? We both know I couldn’t do shit to you even if I tried. I tried when we met, remember?”

“Charlie, you are sending some very confusing social signals.”

“I know. That’s because I’m pissed off and I think you deserve it. You don’t like not being able to predict what I’m going to do, do you? Some human did some unpredictable shit and now every time I surprise anyone in any way they freak the fuck out. Was everyone freaked out by the stunt I pulled with the enemy grapples, or just you and Lil White Mantis?”

“The captain is… bothered.”

“And everyone else?”

“Is bothered.”

“Well, let me tell you something important about humans. First, I admit, that stunt was pretty fucking awesome. I could’ve died of a lot of things out there. I was very lucky, and a story like that would get me a lot of free beers in a lot of pubs on Earth. But here’s the important bit – do you know what a human would do in your position, or the captain’s position, in this situation? They’d not be particularly surprised. Some idiot’s always going to haul off and do something dumb and desperate when backed into a corner. It’s totally normal. I’m guessing some other poor kidnapped sod did something dumb and desperate, didn’t they? And everyone’s hyper-alert, looking for a pattern, waiting to see if it’s gonna happen again. And you’re not supposed to tell me about it because it’ll make me upset enough to make it happen again. Right?”

I said nothing.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. You wanna know something else about humans? We tend to be worst-case-scenario kinda people. Let me tell you, whatever happened probably isn’t half as bad as what I’m imagining happened, and what I’m imagining is going to happen to me. I’m thinking, what could happen that would make so many people so scared? They’re already freaking out; what’ll they do if I put a step wrong? So if you’re worried about what I’m going to do if I find out, you should be ten times more worried about what I’m going to do if I don’t.”

“It’s… complicated.”

“Are we still in a battle with the military?”

“No.”

“Then I’ve got fucking time.”

“The captain has not authorised me to speak – ”

“Glath, you just told me that this ring is literally a giant prison cell about five minutes ago. If you try to leave me here, I am going to draw some pretty unfriendly conclusions. Do you want to see the results of a desperate, cornered human drawing unfriendly conclusions on your ship?”

“… Very well. It begins with Queen Anta, and the planet you call Jupiter.”


	8. Singers and Dancers

It’s hard to get a full story out of someone who’s acting cagey and scared of you. It’s even harder when you don’t properly share a complete language, or even the same cultural criteria for story structure. But this is, to the best of my approximation, the story told to me by Glath, Space Spider Colony and Champion Underestimator of Basic Social Skills.

* * *

When an aljik Queen’s health begins to fail to the point that her capacity to lead is called into question, a Princess has two options. The safer option is to challenge her sisters to a regency fight and kill until she is the only Princess still standing. The dangerous option is to gather whatever court she can convince to follow her and venture away from her mother’s territory to establish one somewhere new and, hopefully, without a strong Queen already present and ready to protect her land.

Anta chose the second path.

She established her territory on the Western fringe of the galaxy, in a spiral arm. It was not prime territory; a deliberate choice, as she wanted little competition. The advantage was the extreme rarity of spacefarers in the area, allowing her to establish her power base at leisure. Planetbound life was usually fairly easy to turn to service for the court, but spacefaring races tended to be able to fight back.

The establishment followed a fairly standard pattern, inasmuch as a standard pattern for such a thing could exist. Anta worked to gather resources to make her court’s new home planets safe and prosperous. She had chosen a location with few resources, but trusted her natural flair for problem-solving and unusual thinking to pull her through, with luck.

And luck she had. For routine surveying of a gas planet found, deep in the planet’s heart, some highly unusual crystals and compounds that were determined to be extremely useful for spaceship manufacture.

The Jupiterians were a jellyfish-like species that swam through their planet freely and built fall crystal towers from its heart, reaching almost to the planet’s surface. It was these impossibly sturdy crystals, able to survive the turbulent environment of Jupiter for many generations, that Queen Anta was most interested in. Some of the enzymes produced within the Jupiterian nervous system were also found to be highly valuable. The court began to harvest both. Straightforward harvest was the only option; neither Anta nor the Jupiterians had any ambassador colonies to negotiate, and a colony was unlikely to be able to accurately reproduce Jupiterian communication in any case. This was not an unusual situation. A non-spacefaring race was unlikely to cause any problems during harvest, Anta’s court reasoned.

This turned out to be a severe miscalculation.

The Jupiterians, although bound to the gases of their own planet, were highly intelligent, highly defensive, and worked well as a group. They quickly learned to disassemble the harvest ships sent into the core of their planet and slaughter any crew aboard. Queen Anta’s harvest operation operated at a net loss for the first three missions, before she started sending more heavily armed ships, and even then, she found herself barely breaking even. The loss of aljik life was becoming intolerable. She was about to give up on the planet, when the Jupiterians sent a ship back.

Jupiter did not have a usable metal content, but the inhabitants had quickly learned and utilised the properties of the ships destroyed within their planet. They had learned the same of the aljik. The ship sent back was one of Anta’s own harvest ships, hastily and unreliably repaired. It was crewed but one of her dohl, one of the few of the prized caste that she had allowed to enter Jupiter. He was alive, but he had been altered.

The Jupiterians had studied killed and captured aljik until they learned enough anatomy to make use of it. They had built some sort of sensory device from their own crystals and metal harvested from aljik ships and attached the device to the dohl’s brain. It operated, after a fashion, as a sort of rudimentary translator. The dohl reported his experiences of the device being built, tested, altered, retested; he knew of at least two previous subjects who had died during testing. By the time he was under their knives, they had developed a rudimentary pleasure/pain communication system that could operate without killing him, and slowly refined it for more nuanced responses. The Jupiterians had discovered a way to properly communicate without the need for ambassador colonies. He told Queen Anta this, and told her that he had been sent back with a message: leave, and do not return. From this moment, every aljik or aljik construction found in Jupiter would be destroyed on sight.

The Queen sent him back.

The message that she sent with him was a request for trade. It was responded to, despite the Jupiterians’ threat. They agreed to limited provision of resources if the aljik could get them to the Light Singers.

The aljik had no idea who these Light Singers might be. The dohl was sent with an enquiry. The Jupiterians explained that some of their crystal spires were built to sense and amplify light. Some of the spires rose to the very surface of the planet, and were able to pick up light from space; this had been initially interesting to their ancestors, but once the patterns of astral light were known and established, became another feature of the great spires. It was only recently that new light arose. Garbled, strange, and from a single source, lighting up any spire pointed in the right direction; some of it was repetitive, like normal astral light, but it repeated at unpredictable intervals, and much didn’t seem to repeat at all. No matter how they interpreted the data, they couldn’t find a way to eliminate noise and reveal a normal, repetitive pattern underneath it. Something out there was sending them something new and varied, yet with underlying order; something was singing across the electromagnetic spectrum. Since seeing the aljik, the Jupiterians had realised that something else might be alive out there, calling them. They wanted to see what it was, to understand the data they were receiving.

The correct planet was easily pinpointed. It was very close, and very easy to travel to. The aljik provided the appropriate resources in exchange for the crystals and compounds they desired, and their dealings with the Jupiterians were concluded. While the initial meetings had been expensive for Anta’s budding court, the interaction had more than paid for itself by the end.

And that would have been the end of an unremarkable harvesting operation, had it not been for the Singers of Light.

The complete story of what had happened never quite made it back to Anta’s court, but bits and pieces were pieced together from the survivors. The Jupiterians, not being able to live comfortably outside the dense gases of their own planet, constructed ships in which they could move comfortably. Having learned how dangerous other life could be from their introduction to the aljik, they observed the Singers carefully and secretly. They took isolated specimens for study, carefully snatching them when they were alone or in very small groups, inspecting them internally for secrets to decoding their behaviour. (This took a lot longer than one might expect, as the Singers needed very different conditions than the Jupiterians to survive – the Jupiterians had to build themselves specialised pressure suits that imitated the Singers’ modes of motion and tool manipulation to even work on them, as simply taking them aboard a ship that a Jupiterian could move around normally would not only kill the Singer but destroy many of their body tissues.)

The Jupiterians became extremely knowledgeable of Singer biology, and were able to identify several castes from varying linguistic capabilities, locations and decorative styles. Eventually, they identified the specific regions of the brain involved in their dominant communication method (verbal) and, through trial and error, developed an implant that could translate broadly between themselves and the Singers.

It is not known at what specific stage the Jupiterians decided just what they wanted to do with the Singers. Perhaps they hatched some form of their plan when they were first attacked by Anta’s court. Perhaps it was only after they witnessed the Singers’ remarkable physical traits and ability to operate in such a varied array of environments. But at some point, the Jupiterians realised that they could not protect themselves in the wider universe. They had held their own against the aljik by virtue of fighting them only in their own natural environment, but outside of Jupiter, they had little in their favour but their intelligence and intense curiosity.

So they decided that they needed proper weaponry. Weaponry like the impressive specimens that they were studying.

Among the facts gathered from their study of the Singers was the knowledge that the Singers had an astounding array of warrior castes spread all over their planet. These warriors were known to travel through air and over water in special vehicles, so the Singers picked a well-populated stretch of ocean and began collecting. They collected and sedated warriors of a variety of castes, implanted them with translators, and woke them up. Ninety six survived the procedure.

While a few of the warriors remained aggressive for quite some time, most of them adapted very quickly to the situation. Violent warriors were quickly restrained and calmed by the others, despite many of the castes not being able to communicate with each other very well. The warriors accepted the information and orders given by the Jupiterians with little protest after it was clear that they would not be returned to Earth, asking multiple clarifying questions about their situation, the technological capabilities of the ship they were on, and the translation implants in their heads. The Jupiterians, eager to reassure their new army of their safety and value and give them whatever information they would need to do their jobs, answered these questions to the best of their ability.

Then, communication all but stopped. The Singers simply stopped speaking to the Jupiterians altogether, and spoke to each other in hand signals and longwinded metaphors, neither of which their implants could translate very well. It took the Jupiterians a little while to piece together the little offhand facts that different people had shared with different Singers and realise that the warriors had pooled their knowledge to circumvent the implants.

The Jupiterians were forced to restrict food and access to comfort to curtail this behaviour. The Singers then enacted a strange ritual, getting into groups of nine or ten. One member of each group would take a handful of ration sticks, shoelaces or a similar material in a fist, altering the bottom of one item in a way that was concealed, and everyone would draw an item. The ones with the odd item out gathered in a second group to repeat this process. The warrior who drew two odd items in a row was sent to the Jupiterians.

“I am Emily,” it said. “I have been chosen as the spokesperson for the humans. Your army demands the immediate removal of the implants you’ve put in our heads. I will remain as a translator, but the others will be removed. We consider it an extreme violation of privacy and your army will not be able to fight with full effectiveness under these conditions.”

“We have observed that some of your castes cannot properly verbally communicate with each other,” the Jupiterians protested. “You need us to translate orders so that everybody can hear.”

“No. We may not share a common language, but humans have many ways of communicating. We can work together far better without the translators. Your army would rather starve than budge on this point. Remove the translators, and speak through me.”

The Jupiterians agreed to this. Emily appeared to be correct; as soon as the translators were removed, the warriors’ moods immediately lifted, and they began eating and speaking directly to each other again. Emily barely participated in these conversations, and the others still spoke in abstract hand signals when it was around, except when giving it a question to ask the Jupiterians. Most of these were answered, bar any questions about the ship’s location relative to Earth or where the home planet of the warriors’ captors (whom the warriors usually referred to as E.T.s or Greys, based on the colour of the Jupiterian pressure suits). It was not long before the Jupiterians were familiar with the basic capacities of their army and said army was trained to use the weapons they had devised for them. They were then pointed towards their first target – the only threat Jupiter had ever faced. The Out-Western Aljik Court.

The Jupiterians had learned of the coordinates of Anta’s home base from their initial aljik captives. They knew the approximate power of her flagship, the Voiddancer, as well as the location of the planet it orbited, the planet that housed the heart of her court.

The army accepted these orders. They trained hard and became effective at using their new weapons. Through Emily, they were provided with as much information as the Jupiterians had on their targets, and what information the Jupiterians deemed necessary on the weapons at the army’s disposal. (Certain information, mostly information about automatic shut downs and self-destructs should certain weapons be used inappropriately, was not deemed necessary to share). The warriors showed limited but effective capabilities in their training, quickly ordered themselves into groups for various tasks decided by competence, and prepared for combat. All the while, the Jupiterians kept a careful eye on everything Emily said, as well as the things it did not say, but that went through the language centres of its brain anyway. They wanted to know absolutely everything about their army.

The Jupiterian ship ignored the aljik ships it encountered on its journey, and was ignored in turn. It was unusual for species to communicate and the aljik considered their dealings with Jupiter closed. They had no reason to suspect the nature of the ship that moved right to the heart of their territory – why would a non-aljik species engage in a territory dispute with the aljik? They were clearly not interested in aljik resources, or they would have attacked the smaller ships they’d encountered, and the aljik were no longer interested in Jupiter’s, so there was no need to interact.

The enormous bulk fo the Voiddancer was beyond anythign the humans or Jupiterians had expected. The Jupiterians almost lost their heart, but the humans insisted that the attack was viable, especially as it would be a surprise. The Jupiterian ship was extremely close when it deployed its first wave of human-controlled attack vessels and sent the command to open fire.

The Jupiterians were already congratulating themselves on this blow to the aljik before the first weapon fired. This proved to be a mistake, as the weapons didn’t fire at the aljik. The tiny attack vessels self-destructed as soon as they were clear of the main ship, immediately killing sixty human warriors – almost two thirds of the Jupiterian attack force.

The second wave was immediately cancelled as the Jupiterians struggled to understand what had gone wrong with their self-destruct protocols. The Jupiterians themselves were huddled in the back of their ship, the most heavily armoured section, with Emily, trying to find out what was happening, but communication through a single translator can only go so fast. By the time the Jupiterians tried to pull back, humans were already exiting the ship, ready to simply leap at the Voiddancer and cut their way in, no matter how much Emily pleaded with them not to.

The Jupiterian orders meant nothing. The warriors insisted that if they didn’t try, the Voiddancer’s retaliation would kill them all anyway.

Seventeen humans called in their intention to make the leap. The Jupiterians heard Emily’s brain translate their heartfelt goodbyes and messages to their families as they exited the ship.

The Jupiterians were seventy seven soldiers down. It was at this point that the Voiddancer noticed the Jupiterian ship, sending a small scout to meet it. The Jupiterians attempted retreat, only for Emily to attempt to wrestle the pilot, screaming that it would not abandon the soldiers who had leapt for the Voiddancer. The Jupiterians, safe in their pressure suits, could easily overpower a single human, but Emily’s cries had been broadcast throughout the ship, and soon other humans were pounding at the door. A hasty mid-struggle interrogation revealed that Emily didn’t know what was going on, but fully expected that every single human still on the ship was likely to rebel at the knowledge that the Jupiterians intended to abandon their comrades in arms. The Jupiterians reasoned that eighteen humans would take an extremely long time to bust through such a door, pinned Emily, and prepared the retreat. It was at this point that the ship’s safety sensors registered rapidly increasing damage to the back wall of the room, where it met the void of space. Somehow, the aljik had determined the weakest part of that wall, and were attempting to cut right into the control section of the ship. The Jupiterians had a choice – wait for the aljik to break in and breach the atmosphere of the room, or flee into the corridor with eighteen human warriors currently trying to break through the door.

The Jupiterians chose the humans, having Emily report the situation and tell them that retreat was now impossible.

They expected the humans to accept this and turn their efforts back to attacking the aljik, if only to save each other. What actually happened was that as soon as the door was opened, far more than eighteen human warriors poured into the room. One of them barked something into the radio, and the breach attempt on the hull ceased immediately. The room was flooded with humans armed with big, heavy, Jupiterian-designed guns which they immediately turned on the Jupiterians and fired. The guns, true to their programming, locked up at this betrayal; the humans, undeterred, simply wielded them as clubs.

The humans showed sudden proficiency in skills that the Jupiterians had never once seen them demonstrate in training. What had seemed like harmless offhand questions about the Jupiterians’ pressure suits and ship design asked slowly over time had suddenly become dangerous military intelligence as makeshift clubs were aimed for the most vulnerable areas of the Jupiterians’ suits and humans slipped behind the ship controls. The soldiers who had made the leap into space – not, as they claimed, to the Voiddancer, but to the back of the Jupiterian ship itself to start cutting into the room from the outside and either force the Jupiterians to open the door or provide an alternate access point – were let back in. Between them and the sixty soldiers that had never boarded the now self-destructed assault vehicles, the Jupiterians didn’t stand a chance. Jupiterians were slaughtered by soldiers who were supposed to be dead using hand-to-hand combat skills they’d never demonstrated in cooperative plays that the Jupiterians hadn’t seen them practice. The lucky ones merely had the limbs torn off their pressure suits and lay, helpless, in the core of the suit, waiting to see what the humans would do to them.

They wondered why they hadn’t seen this in Emily’s mind. The humans freely told them: Emily hadn’t known. The humans had ‘drawn straws’ immediately after deciding that they should come up with a plan but before deciding on any details of it, on the understanding that the translator would be kept completely out of the loop. Emily had had the vague idea that something might or might not happen, depending on what the others could figure out, and nothing else.

Emily was, at that moment, putting on a space suit, becoming indistinguishable from the other human soldiers. In the fight for the control centre of the ship, only two humans had been injured badly enough to be incapacitated. The rest were arming themselves with any non-electronic weapons they could find.

The entire operation had taken about ten minutes. At this point, the Voiddancer’s probe picked up the Jupiterian ship, sheared off some of the more obvious external weapons, and shepherded it to the Voiddancer. Despite Jupiterian protests, the humans did nothing to resist the capture. Once the ship was docked inside the massive bulk of the Voiddancer, the humans tried to communicate with the aljik warriors sent to investigate them, but once it was clear that Emily’s translator worked on Jupiterians alone they became meek, compliant and silent. When the group was brought before Queen Anta, she recognised the handful of now-helpless Jupiterian prisoners and brought forth her translator dohl, and through a chain of the two translators and a Jupiterian prisoner in the middle, the groups were able to communicate.

The humans pleaded their case. Through threats and intimidation, they were able to convince the Jupiterian to more or less accurately convey their situation. They had been stolen from their homes and brought to destroy the court, but had no wish to start a war or to aid their abductors; they had hatched a plan to eliminate the threat posed by the Greys before a single aljik life would be lost. All they wanted, now, was to be taken home.

It is a matter of historical debate, whether the response given to Emily by the captive Jupiterian was a lie or not. While it is almost certain that Queen Anta would indeed order the humans and Jupiterians now aboard her ship to be broken down for any valuable compounds and the remains incinerated, it is unlikely that she would have said so in front of her translator dohl. Whether the Jupiterian translated accurately, or warned the humans of its own accord, or attempted a wild deception that accidentally turned out to be correct, is unknown. The results were the same.

The aljik expected the sudden, vicious human attack even less than the Jupiterians had.

Humans pulled weapons from concealment or improvised them from the environment and attacked. They probably would have lost immediately, had every aljik present in the room not immediately made the severe miscalculation of assuming that Queen Anta was their target. In fact, the two humans that immediately charged, screaming, for the Queen were in the minority; everyone else took advantage of the sudden lack of soldiers behind them to flee the scene, giving any remaining aljik warriors a wide berth and crunching their way through any atil that happened to get in the way. The two who had charged the queen broke off the attack as soon as the warriors reacted; they launched sudden, focused, brutal strikes at the warriors’ weak points to create an opening, and fled after the others, dispersing throughout the ship.

The humans had been provided with every scrap of information that the Jupiterians had on how the aljik and their ships worked. They were very good students.

There were many human casualties in the ensuing battle. The Voiddancer was outfitted with its own army of very competent soldiers, and the humans did not have the element of surprise. But they had studied the design and conventions of the smaller aljik harvest and battle ships sent into Jupiter, and while those were necessarily quite different to the large flagship around them, they were familiar enough with general aljik ship design conventions to launch a more effective attack than Queen Anta had expected. They were an annoyance aboard the ship, dodging and disabling ship monitoring equipment, opportunistically killing any aljik that they happened to take by surprise, destroying cargo and forcing open airlocks to void portions of the ship’s atmosphere into space. Their attacks were impossible to anticipate, as they had no central direction, no overall strategy. The humans did not appear to be working their way towards the Queen, or to be attempting to escape on the Jupiterian ship. Sometimes they would seem to be working towards a goal for a little while, and then do something that would lose them a lot of ground toward that goal for no clear benefit. Sometimes there would appear to be absolutely no overall coordination, and sometimes they would appear to be almost psychic, humans in distant parts of the ship working in apparent unison.

At one point, a group of four humans broke into the ship’s central control area when the Queen wasn’t there. They killed a couple of aljik engineers and immediately left.

Soon after, they broke into the control room again. One of their number had been killed, but despite the lessened threat, the engineers present sensibly retreated rather than die for no reason. This turned out to be a mistake, as by the time an alarm was raised, the humans had already figures out how to take control of some of the ship’s rockets.

They didn’t have particularly good control of the ship. They lacked the organs necessary to properly interface with the computer. Any hope that they had of properly flying the Voiddancer was dashed by that simple fact, but any hope of having any real control at all was further destroyed by the fact that, at almost exactly the same moment, other groups of humans were on the outside of the ship, risking their lives to destroy the Voiddancer’s propulsion systems. The humans in the control room attempted to move the ship, but only had a limited number of rockets to work with; they, like most of the humans on the outside of the shit, were slaughtered. A pointless sacrifice of people working at cross-purposes. Queen Anta quickly retook control of the ship again, intending to return the Voiddancer to its orbit around the heart planet.

Only then did it become apparent that the humans’ sacrifice had not been pointless. The humans had not been trying to steer the Voiddancer with any accuracy. They had merely changed its trajectory a little.

They had moved it so that it was now on a crash course with the heart planet below.

And while it was the matter of mere moments for Queen Anta to regain control of the steering systems, her attempt to recorrect the course was hampered by the fact that the propulsion systems that she needed had been destroyed.

Engineers were sent to correct the problem. Some were slaughtered. Others managed to survive, but were harried and harrassed so that they could not complete their duties. Warriors were ordered out to deal with the problem; in response to the sudden lack of aljik warriors inside the ship, human warriors made for the Jupiterian ship in the hangar, piloting the second wave of assault ships, the ones that had never launched. These were used to support the humans fighting outside the ship, drawing the fire of Anta’s warriors. The humans, their numbers greatly depleted and the survivors mostly injured and weary, had no hope of defeating Anta’s warriors in the open, but they didn’t need to. Their unpredictable tactics with no clear direction or clear struggle for military advantage beyond staying alive moment to moment frustrated Anta’s warriors and allowed other humans to delay the engineers until it was simply too late to save the Voiddancer.

Anta called for a full evacuation of the flagship and the heart planet. There was neither the time nor the resources to evacuate everyone. A quarter of the forces present survived, and none of them had time to chase down of even count the number of human assault ships that fled the scene. Anta’s glorious court had to be rebuilt, quite literally, from the ground up; even those who survived the impact were not safe from the threat of starvation and resource restriction. The entire territory felt the strain of the loss.

For an atil’s age afterward, there were scattered reports of supply and exploration ships disappearing in space. Survivors described attackers that might or might not be humans scavenging for supplies. Although it is impossible for humans to still be out there today, stories of such raiders slaughtering workers who are not properly diligent in their travels and occasional, garbled reports of fleshy killers with improvised weapons echo across the whole of Anta’s territory.

And from that disaster came a new way of living, a revolution of necessity. Anta declared that it was far too dangerous to have a race like humanity loose in her territory. She decreed that Earth would not be harvested, that humanity would not be contacted, and that all were strictly forbidden from singing in light in the proximity of Earth. The entire planet was under quarantine indefinitely. And this rule necessitated a new kind of Empire, a kind never known in Anta’s matrilineal history. This required, for the first time, that the aljik enforce their territorial laws over other species. Anta declared that her rule applied not just to her aljik, but to any and all life in her territory, because anybody contacting humanity put her territory in danger, The rule was for the good of all who lived in the area and all would obey it.

Through this kind of revolutionary thinking, Queen Anta established the Out-Western Aljik Empire, subjecting all species to a universal system of law that superceded any local laws, including those made just for the aljik. Ambassador colonies, being the traditional method of communication between species and having the advantage of not requiring anyone’s brains to be cut open, were encouraged to spread throughout her territory so that proper trade and legal exchange could take place. An aljik military force patrolled the territory looking not just for aljik invaders, but any living thing that endangered the Empire. The Jupiterians still on their home planet, claiming to have no knowledge of the attack on the aljik, worked hard to create and present priceless gifts to the Queen that helped to build her Empire ever stronger, and successfully avoided annihilation.

And since that decision, the Singers of Light have sung alone into a void that would never respond.


	9. Every Species Walks Alone

I listened carefully to Glath’s story, stopping him several times to clarify key points. I wrote the whole thing down, then read over it, then asked more questions to fill in some of the more obvious holes and address any conflicts. Then, confident that I had all the key details straight, I calmly closed my laptop and put it away.

“What the fuck,” I said calmly, “is wrong with you people? Do you seriously have a fucking death wish? I mean, we are definitely all going to die out here. That’s a fact.”

“I do not understand. You… are not going to do anything to kill everyone, are you?”

“I just saved your several hundred spider butts, so no, that sounds kind of like a waste of time. I wasn’t suggesting I’m dangerous. I meant we’re all going to die because whoever’s in charge here, Captain Nemo I assume, makes the absolute worst fucking decisions ever. What kind of absolute moron would know a history like that and still pick me up? It that’s all you know about humanity, in what way was that any kind of good idea? ‘Oh, that hitchhiker by the side of the road outside this high security prison wearing orange seems to be carrying a severed human head. I should pick him up so that when we get into the city I can use the car pool lane!’ I mean, fuck. That’s an awful decision. How did you know I wasn’t just gonna go murder-crazy on the whole damn ship?”

“This is why we were careful to get an engineer,” Glath assured me.

“And why you were so nervous about me using those skills to take down a ship. Yeah, I get it. Kind of like how the humans in your story used engineering skills to take down the Voiddancer. Or to operate the Jupiterian ship. Or to fight the Jupiterians, probably, I mean they were in fancy pressure suits, right? Or the part where they figured out how to self-destruct the Jupiterian assault ships to start their little resistance plan in the first place. Or the obvious engineering-style thinking involved in putting together little hints to figure out how the translator chips work in the first place so they could develop their plan in secret. You know, all the key parts of the story.”

“We suspect that an engineer was accidentally included with the military,” Glath said, “or possibly a member of a versatile caste, like the dohl. It would not have been effective without a significant number of combatants backing it up.”

“Good use of ‘backing it up’, that’s the exact way to use it. I guess that’s true; I mean, one little human of any caste is probably pretty easy to overpower. But still, this sounds ridiculously dangerous, endangering this ship and whole Empire for a bit of engineering work. Couldn’t your living aljik engineer… who I still haven’t met, by the way… have done it himself? I mean I know it’s a two-person job but surely that would’ve been safer. Or just, I dunno, pick up some out-of-work sod who’s looking for adventure at the nearest pirate port.”

“What is a pirate port?”

I waved an arm vaguely. “You know, wherever you sell your ill-gotten plunder. I’m sure you resupply somewhere. Just… fuck. I mean. Basic risk management.”

“Without the repair, the ship would not have made it to a, ah, pirate port. We had no option.”

“It was one little bar. I’m sure anyone on the ship could’ve replaced a single bar. It was hardly master engineer material.”

“Perhaps.”

“No further explanation?”

“I am not supposed to question the captain’s decisions.”

“You’re not supposed to question them, or you don’t question them?”

Glath’s spiders milled uncertainly around his central shape. “We took every precaution that we could. We expected a lone engineer to be a safe acquisition.”

I didn’t like being called an acquisition, but my pride lost that battle to my survival instinct. At this point, my best bet for not being killed seemed to be to be nonthreatening and helpful and not look like someone about to haul off and bring an empire to its knees.

“Say, Glath, do all the species you work with have biological castes?”

“Of course not. The drakes have no castes.”

“Drakes being the four-tailed giant goannas?”

An internal rustle of translation. “Yes.”

I chewed a nail and thought. “Huh. What about the Jupiterians?”

“I know very little about them.”

“But they’re your primary source of information on humans, right?”

“Yes.”

“And when that information was acquired, we were only the second alien species they’d encountered, right after the aljik?”

“Yes.”

“And the aljik definitely do have very rigid biological castes?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious.” I glanced at Glath. He didn’t seem nearly so worried, now that he’d told his story and seen my reaction. What had he expected me to do? Go off on a rampage in revenge for the ninety six abducted humans? I hadn’t figured out how to get myself home yet. “Thanks for telling me, Glath. I didn’t realise what legacy I was dealing with here. I’ll try to freak everyone out a bit less from now on.” I gave him a smile. “So, anyway, what’d you come down here for?”

“The captain wanted to make sure that you are you, and that you were okay.”

“I’m okay as in not dying, or okay as in not going on rampage?”

“Both?”

I nodded. “Well I guess you have lots of good news for her, then.”

“I will, uh, see how the food development issue is progressing.”

I nodded. “Thanks.”

Glath left. I retrieved my laptop, lay back on the hood of my car, and read the story again. A story can usually be told in dozens of ways, and you can tell a lot about a person from how they decide to tell one. I’d preserved as much of Glath’s initial language as I could, but the story had still been corrupted by my own expectations of pacing and story structure. That wasn’t something I could help; I’d asked a lot of questions and filled in the answers, and well, if Glath had had any concept of story structure then it wasn’t anything close enough to mine to recognise. Glath’s English also wasn’t entirely fluent yet, so there were a few odd language choices that would’ve told me a lot about a native speaker and that told me somewhat less about Glath. But there was still troubling information I’d picked up in there. Information I wanted to double-check.

The stuff about the humans was… interesting. It certainly gave a lot of context to my situation, most notably that our captain was a fucking idiot, the crew were intensely loyal for reasons I hadn’t been privy to or they would’ve rebelled at this nonsense, and I was in way more danger than I’d thought. It was sheer luck that I’d survived threatening Glath. He could very well have decided to leave, told the captain, and had all the atmosphere drained out of my ring or something to eliminate a clear threat.

The stuff about the humans was interesting, but it was not, in my opinion, the most significant thing about the story in front of me.

I could get a limited amount of information from Glath based on his word choices or concept of story structure. But without those things, you can still tell a lot about someone, including the assumptions they’re making about their audience, on that they decide to try to sell you on, and what they consider to be a given.

For example, if I were telling the story of the danger of humanity. I would’ve focused more on the actions of humanity; on how they organised, how they achieved what they achieved. Glath apparently felt that the danger was so obvious it required very little further elaboration. Also requiring very elaboration was the ‘harvesting’ of resources from sapient fucking beings early in the story, which Glath seemed to accept as the natural way of things. No, everything in Glath’s telling of the story lead up to one huge, unbelievable concept: the idea that more than one species could be part of a single society.

Sure, that was probably way harder to achieve than fiction made it sound, but… the concept wasn’t a tricky one. I couldn’t think of too many stories with aliens in them that didn’t assume some kind of overarching government or system of law. You met people, and they were very different people, and so you figured something out. Or if human history was any guide, you had a big war and whoever lost had their civilisation trashed for multiple generations, but the ideal was to figure something out. Why was that a revolutionary concept? Why did it take nearly losing her entire kingdom for Anta to come up with unbelievable, never-been-heard-of-before idea?

I read the story again, trying to look for an answer other than the obvious one. There was only the obvious one, and I didn’t want to believe that one because it put me in far more danger than any mere concept of being the galaxy’s monster-in-the-dark. The only reason this idea of uniting people could be so revolutionary was that the aljik didn’t think of other species as people.

In Glath’s story – and admittedly it was perfectly possible that I’d gotten some details wrong, or that Glath had – that simple fact bled through every interaction. The Jupiterians, and later the humans, were a resource, threat or inconvenience. Negotiation and trade was treated like… like waiting for the ice to thaw before heading into the river, or like finding a passage through the mountain, or something, not like reasonable negotiation between peoples. And maybe that was just my narrow human brain anthropomorphising these aliens, but it seemed like the only way to make sense of the whole thing. Why was Glath so baffled that I could do something as simple as learn to read someone’s emotions without having to imitate them? Why did everyone seem to either talk via Glath taking on various forms, or via invasive brain surgery and trial-and-error experimentation? Did that mean the Jupiterians had this same problem? What about the drakes? Did the galaxy, or just the empire even, not have even a rudimentary universal language? They’d have to, right? Even just… arm signals or writing or something, something a lot of species could approximate. Was that why nobody except Glath ever tried to communicate with me? A mixture of fear and a simple assumption that it couldn’t be done?

And what was Glath’s deal, anyway? Were talking spider colonies just everywhere, helpfully translating for people, or what? There were a ton of aljik and quite a lot of drakes on board, but I’d only seen one ambassador colony. Were there more on the ship, or was Glath alone, as much as a hive mind could be alone?

None of it made sense. I couldn’t see how anything could function if people couldn’t recognise each other as people. I mean, yes, we’d had that sort of thing on Earth – still did, in some places – where people thought that others from different places or of different races were subhuman, but that was… denial, really, wasn’t it? People trying to salvage their conscience while they got people to work for them for free. I dunno. I wasn’t in a position to evaluate historical dehumanisation on Earth, or alien perspectives on personhood. I didn’t have the perspective for it. Besides, I seemed to baffle them, so maybe it was fair for them to baffle me, too.

Another little white aljik – or maybe the same one, I couldn’t tell them apart – showed up to drop a crate just inside the door of my ring and then flee before I could say anything. The crate was about the size of a couple of pillows stacked on top of each other, plastic, and lightweight; the greyish stuff inside was somewhat less lightweight. The stuff turned out to be stiff little chunks of something about the size of my hand with the texture of jerky. They smelled like unwashed feet on a hot day, but this had to be my long-awaited food.

I tried some. It had the texture of jerky, and tasted exactly how it smelled. Washing it down with water just made the flavour stronger, somehow. I ate until my hunger had been dulled enough that eating foot sweat jerky no longer sounded like such an amazing idea, stashed the crate a decent distance from anything I planned on using on a regular basis, and pondered my next step.

I took my laptop to the bridge and sat against a wall where I didn’t seem to be in anybody’s way. The doors opened for me and nobody chased me off, so I opened my laptop and alternated between reading up on basic physics, and people watching.

A lot of communication was definitely happening on the bridge, but so far as I could tell, none of it was cross-species. Drakes talked to drakes in a mixture of low moans and tail and wing gestures. Aljik of all kinds of different castes clicked and chirped at each other, and while some could make gestures with their wing cases and forelimbs that others couldn’t, they still seemed to be able to hold a conversation with each other. Between aljik and drakes? Nothing. Not that I could see, anyway. It was entirely possible that I couldn’t physically see or hear or smell everything that was happening. It was equally possible that I wasn’t picking up on stuff I could see because I only had Earth experience to tell me what was important in communication. And of course my observations were tainted by the fact that nobody wanted to be too close to me, presumably in case I started ripping limbs in a sudden bout of unquenchable human rage. But the two groups seemed, by and large, to treat each other like furniture. Like less than furniture -- humans talked to furniture all the time. We swore at chairs when we stubbed out toe, we gently encouraged computers when they were slow or threatened them when we ran out of patience. Maybe it had nothing to do with humanisation, for lack of a better term (sapienisation?); maybe humans were just weirdly communicative. Were there any other species on the ship I could observe? I’d have to ask Glath about it. Glath couldn’t possibly be the only method of communication between the species. He’d be run off his feet. Or flown off his wings. Or whatever. There was a lot going on with computers that I didn’t really understand; drakes would wave their tails over lights on consoles and different things would light up, and the captain talked to the ship through those things that wired her to the wall, so maybe it was just an office heavy on email rather than talking.

I hoped it was.

For now we were alive. For now, all of my immediate problems, at least, were solved. Food, water, electricity, didn’t seem to be in immediate danger of being killed by my own crewmates or the military so long as nobody panicked…

Time to settle down and actually figure out a proper plan to get home, I guess.

Shit.


	10. Housekeeping

I watched the people on the bridge very carefully for some time, wishing I could read their moods properly. A lot of them were definitely afraid of me, but some of the drakes especially seemed… well, they glanced at me a lot, but when they did, they seemed to calm down slightly. They probably liked having me where they could see me. Maybe that was why nobody had sent Glath to get rid of me.

I sympathised. After hearing about what the previous abductees had done to the Voiddancer, if I were in there position, I’d want to be able to keep tabs on the human aboard the ship the entire time.

Why would the captain abduct me, knowing that story? Why would she abduct me if she thought I might be that dangerous? Was she stupid? Or the most selfish person in all existence? Or was there something else about this whole situation that I didn’t know yet?

Didn’t matter. My job was to get back to earth and my family and…

And what? Pretend I hadn’t met aliens? Or tell everyone, and have them think I was nuts? Life outside of Earth existed. We weren’t alone, some nigh-impossible quirk of physics paying for our momentary complexity by running up entropy slightly faster than if we hadn’t existed. We were… well, I didn’t have stats, but we were a common enough phenomenon in the universe to find each other. The tree of life was part of a forest. Or a small scrubland, at least. Something. It wasn’t just us and space rocks; other meaningful things outside ourselves existed. They’d just been hiding behind the sofa when we went doorknocking, hoping we’d go away instead of telling them about Jesus. Or destroying the heart of their empire.

The metaphor works. Shut up.

You might think that I should’ve thought through all this as soon as I’d realised I was abducted by aliens. But I had been under a slight amount of stress at the time, with other things on my mind, like not dying. Now… even if I made it home, how was I supposed to explain any of this? There was no way I’d be able to keep the biggest news humanity had ever received a secret. So I’d just be the nutcase, I guessed, who went missing and came back blathering about aliens… well. If that’s how it had to be then, I mean, there wasn’t a huge amount I could do about it. Leaving my boys as orphans, my parents and sister to wonder forever what had happened to me on the dark road, disappearing as a nameless missing person statistic… that was completely out of the question. That would’ve been out of the question even if all aliens weren’t apparently arseholes who lived at nausea-inducing gravities and ridiculous air pressures. (Air pressures that should be causing me at least some inconvenience breathing; how was I getting enough oxygen? Another question for Glath.) But if I was going to find my planet, steal a ship and head home, then Glath’s story highlighted a need to be very, very careful about it. The last thing I wanted was to be seen as accidentally declaring war on the Empire (what was the ship’s relationship to the Empire, if we were a bunch of pirates? Another question for Glath), and get blasted to bits in a panic.

Still, the overall plan hadn’t changed. Find out where home was. Find out how to get a ship there. Get the ship there.

Finding out where we were was the first step, I supposed. Nobody was paying attention to what I was actually doing with my laptop, so I had no compunctions about pulling up the videos I’d taken of space while outside the ship and sifting through my pirated textbooks for anything on astronomy or astrophysics. As soon as I found a star chart, I regretted this course of action. Those things were complicated. How was I supposed to know which star was which? How was I supposed to know what part of what chart to even look at?

Nothing for it but manual comparison.

I spent half an hour alternating between watching the bridge crew and searching for star maps before the air pressure was too much for me to tolerate. I returned to my ring, ate some more grey foot jerky, and took a break to stare at the wall and wish I had something more engaging to do than stare at more goddamn star charts. But delaying wasn’t getting me home any faster. I grit my teeth, and got to work.

Occasionally, I would find something of a similar sort of pattern to something I’d videoed, and get excited, only to find that they didn’t in fact match. It took all my willpower, in those moments, not to throw my laptop at the wall as hard as I possibly could. My phone, of course, was safe – there was absolutely no way I could allow harm to come to it.

It had photos of my family on it.

I’d been working for ninety minutes before I remembered that my star footage had been taken before we’d fled the military and did not, in fact, tell me where we were. Fortunately, sound didn’t travel well on the ship, so I could scream in unbridled frustration as much as I wanted and not disturb anybody. I was halfway through kitting up to go out and take new footage when I realised that, oh yeah, space is a three dimensional environment. If we weren’t on Earth, I wouldn’t see the same constellations as Earth, and I had neither the information nor the mental ability to calculate what I should see in various areas further from Earth.

I punched the wall, succeeding only in hurting my hand. More bruises. Marvellous.

Okay. Okay. I could work with this. It was just a slight hiccup. I’d find some other way of finding out where I was. Hell, where I was would probably change a lot, anyway. I’d be better off waiting until we docked somewhere to resupply. There were other things I still needed to know before I could do anything, so I should figure those things out so that I would be ready.

I needed to learn how to fly the ship, or at least one of the escape pods. I needed to know who was likely to do what when I stole one; who would notice, who would try to kill me, who would flee, how far I would be chased. I needed to know how long the journey would take, and what supplies I’d need. Could the escape pods do the blue-glow thing, the high-speed travel that Glath called a dash? What kind of fuel did they need? How far could they travel? I needed a lot of information before I could actually do anything, so there was no point in getting all upset about not knowing specifically where I was at that particular moment, or where Earth was. We had to stop at a port with a fixed address sometime, and if Earth was important enough to build a multispecies fucking empire around ensuring its quarantine, then sooner or later I was sure I’d come across it marked on a map.

I checked to make sure I hadn’t fractured anything inside my hand. It seemed fine.

For now, heal and learn, and wait to see if grey foot jerky would poison me. Maybe I could decorate my ring a bit, turn it into a home. The drakes had built theirs into a maze of tapestry-separated rooms; the aljik had created an on-board alien swamp. I didn’t have much in the way of human artefacts on hand but I could probably do better than just living in my car. It couldn’t be too hard to build a bed, for example.

Over the next few days, I did just that, using the stuff in the crates in my ring. I figured if anybody needed the equipment, it shouldn’t be too hard to disassemble again. I fiddled with the lighting in the ring to simulate pleasant, sunny, 25-hour days (my own biological clock always lagged a bit behind the sun) and used the self-standing panels to make walls and build myself a roofless house. I gathered enough spongy materials to make a mattress and propped it on some particularly small crates, made a passably comfortable couch in a similar manner, and worked to make my house as, well, house-like as possible.

It was missing quite a lot, of course. It would’ve been nice to have a nicely outfitted kitchen instead of crates of smelly grey jerky and lollipops, and I also looked forward to returning to a planet that had plumbing set up for human physiology. Perhaps the most irritating thing was the lack of cloth. I only had one set of clothes and no blankets or anything. Glath probably could’ve got me some more space suit material if I’d asked, but it still felt like squishy, fresh skin to me.

Between bursts of housekeeping, I studied up on basic science and engineering, or watched other crew members. Not only did I want to learn about them, I wanted them to get used to seeing me around. If I was going to steal a ship and escape home, I needed to be able to move around the ship without anyone wondering where I was going, so it was best to establish that habit early. I spent a lot of time in the limited spaces I had access to, observing and hanging out, and talked to Glath.

Glath didn’t know a huge amount about drakes, although he said they had a morphologically interesting life cycle that he didn’t entirely understand. He knew a whole lot more about the aljik, though. Glath’s ‘template’, the being he liked to follow around and imitate, was an aljik of the dohl caste named Kit, so Glath had acquired about as much information on the aljik in general as a dohl would be expected to have. Which, as it turned out, was a lot.

“Hold up,” I interrupted as he explained this and, in usual Glath style, skipped right over all of the interesting parts. “I don’t want to get, you know, too personal or anything, but… you pretend to be Kit? That’s how your identity works?”

“Not quite,” Glath said. His imitation of my voice was friendly and accommodating, but his outer spiders fidgeted in a way that I’d learned, through trial and error, indicated something akin to discomfort or awkwardness. “My people generally choose a… type of being to imitate. The number of individuals from whom we glean information is a matter of convenience and personal taste. Dohl are rare and… occasionally highly mobile.”

I nodded. “So he’s the only one you got. Fair enough.”

“The Princess has three dohl, but – ”

“Wait. Princess? Glath, if you’re going to tell me that the military is after us because we kidnapped royalty or some shit – ”

“No,” he said quickly, internal translator rustling away. “She is here of her own volition.”

“I hope you mean she’s old enough to make that choice and not some kid who’s been tempted away,” I said acidly.

“She is the captain,” Glath said.

“Oh, she – oh. Right. Of course. Never mind.” That made sense. I knew that aljik society ordered themselves around a Queen caste, so if the aljik on this ship were outlaws and not obeying the empire’s Queen then that made sense. Probably. “Sorry, I pulled us off track. Princess Nemo. Got it. But Kit’s like, what, your favourite dohl?”

“Something along those lines,” Glath confirmed.

I stopped trying to understand. “But you don’t just imitate a dohl,” I said. “I’ve seen you turn into a drake. You turned into a human to talk to me, at first, although you didn’t like it.”

Glath shifted uncomfortably. “The Princess is… clever, in certain ways, as they say Anta was,” he said. “She has found methods of using my talents that would not ordinarily be employed.”

“It’s not normal, then.”

“No. Usually, an ambassador takes a shape and keeps it as well as they can, becoming ever better, unless there is a physiological reason to temporarily abandon it. Princess Nemo has… redefined physiological reasons. Under normal circumstances, an aljik Princess wishing to communicate with drakes would find an aljik ambassador and seek a herd of drakes who also have an ambassador.”

“But she’s got you talking with everyone alone,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “How common are you ambassador colonies? Is it easy to find drakes with an ambassador?”

“We are far less common than the aljik running Anta’s combined empire would like,” he said. “And we do not generally tolerate each other’s presence for long.”

“Ambassadors don’t like ambassadors?”

“It is… physically very uncomfortable to be too near another ambassador. Signals can become confused.” Glath’s outer spiders milled. “We avoid contact as much as possible.”

“So it’s basically a miracle this empire works at all, then?”

“The rogue Queen has quite a lot of very large weapons and very capable members of all three warrior castes.”

“Well that explains it, then.” I rubbed my temples. “And the warriors are the giant red tank ladies – ”

“The tahl.”

“ – them; the dohl, who are pale blue with little claw hands, and… who?”

“The shyr.”

“Right. I haven’t seen any of those.”

“Very few people do. They are known for their stealth. They attack with surprise, and toxins.”

“Good to know, I’ll be careful not to piss any of them off.”

“If there are shyr on this ship, I am not aware of them.”

“Aren’t you aware of everything?”

“Unlikely. The captain does not share all of her plans with her dohl, no matter how trusted.”

“Yeah, she strikes me as the sort of person who wouldn’t.” I took note of Glath’s tone. He was getting very good at human inflections and sardonic disapproval was one of his favourites. Captain Nemo had Glath doing a job he wasn’t really comfortable with, and this wasn’t the first time he’d expressed disapproval of her decisions, as much as he clearly admired her lateral thinking skills. Why was he here if he didn’t like her?

Man, I wished I could speak to her properly. I trusted Glath, but having him filter all of my communication with everyone was going to colour everything I learned. I needed to get off my butt and figure out a common language with my other crewmates.

“So they’re our warriors,” I pressed on. “And who else is on the ship? The Princess, of course, and our remaining aljik engineer… what caste is he?”

“Engineers are the kel caste.”

“Kel, gotcha. And we have a billion of those little pale servant dudes.”

“Atil. They are female, not ‘dudes’.”

“Pale servant girls, then. Is that all we have?”

“Yes.”

“Is that all that exists?”

“… No. We are… missing several key components for a court.”

“Is that important?”

“The captain does not think so.”

That tone again. Some kind of big disagreement there. I made a mental note to pry that little nugget out when it seemed safe to do so.

“Okay, so we have a bunch of aljik but not enough for a court, some drakes to do the computer stuff, you, and me. Is anyone else aboard the ship?”

“The kohrir, but it is very unlikely that they will need to be awoken.”

“Kohrir?”

“They are...” Glath paused for a long time while his translator rustled away. “It is difficult to find an accurate translation for the term. Fear Giants of the Dawn, perhaps?”

I blinked. “That doesn’t sound – ”

“No – Ancient Dread Behemoths!” Glath exclaimed triumphantly. “Yes, that is a very nearly accurate translation, I think.”

“That sounds worse!”

“They are certainly not to be taken lightly.”

“You’re telling me that everyone was shitting themselves over having puny little me on board but you’re sheltering something called an ancient dread behemoth?!”

“Two of them. They were too large to fit on the escape pods when we took the ship.”

“You’re sheltering two ancient dread behemoths because they are convicted criminals who are physically too large to send away?!”

“So long as they do not wake up, there should be no problems.”

“And if they do?!”

“Then we will not allow them out of their ring,” Glath said, flicking a simulated forelimb dismissively. “They would be a chore to move around anyway, being too large for the shafts.”

“… Uh-huh. Okay. Sure. Any other nasty surprises? Any other giant vicious criminals I need to be careful not to wake up?”

“No.”

“That’s everyone on the ship?”

“Oh, no. But neither the haltig nor the ketestri are capable of sleep. And neither are of alarming size.”

“I have learned way too many new words today. Is it important for me to know who either of those things are right now?”

“No.”

“Good. Okay. Fine.” I needed, like, a week of bad television and naps. I made a mental note to schedule that as soon as I got home.

“Everybody else was either killed in the conflict to take the prison, or escaped on the pods immediately afterward.”

“You reckon any of them got away?”

“Almost definitely not.”

“Killed or recaptured?”

“That would depend on how stupid their decisions were.”

“Okay. Right. So then, to sum up – ” I was interrupted by the ship’s alarm once more. “More military?! Already?! Isn’t space supposed to be big?”

“It may not be military. It may be a target to resupply.”

“How will we know?”

“There will be another alarm.”

“Right, right, great. Do you need to, um, go and… defend the ship, or whatever?” I asked, eyeing the cloud of fairly harmless spiders doubtfully.

“I have no duties until the next alarm tells me how to proceed.”

“Okay. Right. So then. To sum up. Ship’s crew, so far as you know – an aljik Princess for a captain with a small contingent of dohl courtiers and torl warriors – ”

“Tahl.”

“Tahl, right, thank you… one, um, kel engineer, who is functionally useless since they’re supposed to work in pairs, is that right?”

“Not for all repairs. But his usefulness is somewhat diminished.”

“Okay then. So him; and you, who are basically a dohl but due to physical differences tend to function as a general translator on the ship; a whole bunch of atil who can do basic cleaning and stuff but are dumber than a sack of marbles and would probably lose a fight with a kitten; me, a human engineer; a bunch of drakes; two species whose names I didn’t remember who I can worry about later; and two somethings called Ancient Dread Behemoths that I never ever want to meet.”

“That is accurate.”

“Gotcha. And, uh, sorry but I can’t actually tell if this is a rude question or not… how exactly do I tell the engineers from the courtiers? Maybe it’s a limited visual wavelength thing but they look exactly the same to me.”

“That is a common opinion of non-aljik species. The easiest way to tell is to examine their facial adornments.”

“So they just choose to decorate differently?” I swallowed. Time to broach the big questions. The questions that could get me killed if Glath was smart enough to wonder what kind of perspective they came from. “So, it’s based on their choices, then? Are they biologically different?”

“Of course. Dohl are one of the few fertile castes. Kel, like most aljik, are infertile.”

I filed that away in the ‘Kate would find this fascinating for reasons I don’t understand or care about’ part of my brain. Maybe I could tell her later while she pretended not to believe I was nuts.

“Are they mentally different?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, obviously there are huge differences between the aljik castes. Sending a dohl to do a tahl’s job would get him killed; sending an atil to do a kel’s job would just make her confused and panicked. But I don’t… I can’t tell how much of the difference is biological, and how much is social. I mean, if you raised a kel to believe he was a dohl, could he do a dohl’s job?”

“He would be infertile,” Glath repeated. “He would give the Queen no children.”

I opened my mouth, knowing full well that what I was about to say was rude as shit, but I needed to get my point across. “You’re not likely to give a Queen any children,” I said. “Don’t you do a dohl’s job? Apart from the translating and stuff, I mean.”

You’d think it would be hard to tell when a cloud of spiders you’re not too familiar with, who is imitating a giant mantis you’re not too familiar with, is giving you icy, dignified silence. It isn’t. It isn’t hard at all.

“Okay, what about the other way,” I said. “Is there any physical reason that a dohl couldn’t do engineering work? Could your template Kit had put on a kel space suit and gone out there with the engineer to replace the bar you grabbed me for?”

“Of course not, that suggestion is absurd. Nobody would risk a dohl in such a way, especially when we have so few.”

“Okay, first, you’re doing really well on your word-choice-with-tone thing in my language, that sounded exactly as pompous as I’m sure you intended. Second, since you needed an engineer to live right at that moment and I don’t think Princess Nemo will be popping out too many little space mantis larvae on this ship, I think your cost-benefit calculation is way off. Third, that’s not really what I mean. Forget sensible decisions and risk for a minute – would it be possible? Cost-benefit aside, is there anything that would make kit unable to do an engineer’s work if he had to? If, and I know you think it would be a ‘waste’ but bear with me, if you raised a dohl to think it was a kel and taught it all the things kel are taught and let it grow up with other kel, would it be able to do engineering as well as they could?”

Glath shifted his spiders uncomfortably. “I… do not know,” he said. “To my knowledge, nobody has tried such a thing. Nobody would waste or disgrace a dohl in that way. So I have no answer for you. Why do you want to do such a thing? Why would you want to destroy a court in such a – ”

“Calm down, I’m not here to lead a Kel Revolution Against The Bourgeoisie Courtier Castes. I don’t want to do anything, I just wanted to know what would happen if you did.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m trying to figure out how much of your caste system is biological, and how much is social,” I said. “How much is training and soforth. How… flexible aljik are, mentally.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Well, look. I know there’s not a huge amount of space in those big shiny carapaces for brains and a division of skills makes sense, but I… find it really hard to digest the idea that a species with an inflexible caste system made it into space. Maybe this is just my alien naievete talking, but I mean… somebody had to invent the spaceships, right? And the faster-than-light travel? I’m guessing the aljik didn’t just steal everything they have off aliens, and even if they did, somebody had to understand and adapt those systems, and teach the new generation to understand them – this isn’t like ants, where a bunch of preset instructions can run their entire lives with very few decisions to make, and change comes slowly enough for strategies to get instinctively encoded. Here you need speed, you need learning, you need flexibility; heck, Anta building the Empire and Princess Nemo in there giving you your job shows that the Queen caste, at least, can think outside the box. I’m trying to figure out how big people’s “boxes” are, how much… how much individual intelligence, I guess, the aljik have. I mean I strongly suspect that your spiders are all dumb as shit and your intelligence comes from the community, right? Like a hive mind? But I don’t think there are enough aljik in close proximity for that to work on a scale that’s relevant here, and I find it hard to believe that a species that couldn’t teach any single one of its members to replace a simple fucking metal bar could… ah, fuck, I’m doing a Kate, sorry. Didn’t realise my sister was contagious.” I swallowed around the sudden lump in my throat.

But Glath hadn’t interrupted me, and said nothing now. He was… well, staring isn’t quite the right word for someone with eyesight as shitty as Glath’s, but he was observing me. I could feel it. The ‘head’ of his dohl shape wasn’t even pointed in my direction, but since every one of his spiders had their own senses, that meant nothing. I could feel him observing, calculating, dissecting my words and my posture. It was similar to when he was first learning how my body and speech patterns moved, but he had that information now. He was dissecting something else.

Fuck. Fuck. I’d said WAY too much.

“You are not an engineer,” he said.

“You can’t prove that,” I said quickly, stupidly.

“What are you?”

“Not military. I swear.”

“I have no reason to believe that.”

“You have no reason not to,” I replied. “Don’t freak out on me, Glath, okay? I’m not gonna go murdercrazy on the Stardancer. I’ve been nothing but helpful since I came aboard.”

'Like the Jupiterian’s captives were' rang silently between us. And somehow my previous remarks about how that supposedly military force had committed various feats of offensive engineering, much as I had done against the military, didn’t seem particularly supportive of my case.

“I believe you,” Glath said in a convincing tone, which meant nothing from somebody who could perfectly imitate any sound you made. “I don’t make the decisions on this ship, though.”

“Do you trust the captain to make the right one?”

Another alarm sounded through the ship.

“I am needed,” Glath said, and headed for the exit shaft.

“Wait!” I reached out to grab Glath’s forelimb, but my hand passed straight through it. Glath didn’t slow. The shaft door closed behind him. I stood, hesitant.

This shouldn’t be that big of a deal, right? They were the ones who’d assumed I was an engineer, and so far I’d shown myself perfectly capable of being an engineer, but… but if their castes were rigid, and in the face of the Jupiterian story only an assumed rigidity on my skills had made me seem low-risk enough to keep around…

The captain would kill me with that information, right? She’d have to. She’d taken an absurd-looking risk abducting me but she couldn’t be totally risk-blind. Glath had talked about Anta’s disregard for other life as if it was perfectly normal Queen behaviour; if the Princess was like that…

If Glath was going to tell her, I needed to be preparing myself right now. Getting ready for a fight, famous-last-stand style, seeing if I could somehow steal an escape pod or something, anything… if he wasn’t going to tell her, I had to do nothing, nothing that would freak the ship out more. Fuck. What was I supposed to do?

I couldn’t afford to guess wrong. Could I trust Glath, or couldn’t I?


	11. Hooray for Piracy

What the hell was I supposed to do?

I wasn’t overreacting, was I? Maybe… the captain had gone to Earth and abducted a human, knowing the stories. She was on the run from the Queen in a flying prison that was ridiculously ill-equipped for her chosen career path, she’d released a bunch of criminals as a distraction to escape with said prison, there were apparently some actual fucking monsters on board, and I’d already saved the ship once. Maybe she’d look at me and see not danger, but potential. This whole crew was a bunch of spare parts from various species welded together into a Rube-Golberg machine of minimum competence and surviving on the power of surprise, and I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of her coming up with anything for me to do other than my relatively chill job of replacing occasional engine parts, but it might give me opportunity. Opportunity to make connections, to learn, to find Earth. So maybe there was nothing to worry about. Glath had seemed freaked out, but… well, usually some part of Glath was freaking out at least a little bit over something, it was probably a hive mind thing. Like how on a perfectly calm day where nothing unusual was happening, you could log onto the internet and immediately find five brands of nut screaming about the end of the world. I had been kind of rude and invasive with my questions at the time, and there was the potential for another dangerous battle to start any moment, so I couldn’t be sure that Glath’s reaction to me was a normal one. Besides, the captain took far more risks than Glath would like anyway. And he was probably hurt because I’d lied about being an engineer. Maybe, after the battle, everything would be okay. Maybe he wouldn’t tell the captain, and if he did, maybe she’d see it as a positive thing. Maybe I had nothing to worry about.

Maybe.

I put my space suit on and replaced my air tank. Whatever happened next, whether at the spear-hands of the captain or the space grapples of the ship we’d sighted, I felt much more comfortable having my own personal atmosphere for it.

Then I headed into the main ship, because I felt kind of helpless hanging around a repurposed prison cell with a single access shaft that could be locked at any time from the bridge.

Helmet under my arm and breather ready to shove into my mouth at any moment, I headed for the bridge. The door opened for me this time. Good sign? Maybe.

The bridge was active. Drakes raced back and forth from computer to computer; agitated aljik gathered into complicated groups whose makeup I didn’t entirely understand. Glath was in conversation with the captain. About me? No… no, we were dealing with the ship thing, right? That had to come first. Surely.

I set my jaw and strode over. “Glath, what’s going on?”

“A target,” some of him told me while the rest didn’t even pause in his current conversation. “The ship on our periphery is not military, and appears to be low-powered and high-stocked enough to be worth an attack. It is an oxygen-breathing ship, so we are preparing an invasion force.”

“Is it an aljik ship?”

“No. Probably drake, but it is difficult to be certain.” Something chimed. “It is a drake ship,” Glath amended.

I nodded and got the hell out of everyone’s way, finding a wall that wasn’t in the midst of any traffic flows. The invasion teams each had a big red tahl and a smaller blue dohl, flanked by about five or so of the fragile little atil. The dohl carried some sort of long, sharp knives in each of their foreclaws. It was hard to be sure, but from the colour and shape, those knives looked like they were made from intricately carved pieces of dohl carapace, the curved bits that covered the wings. Badarse.

The tahl didn’t carry weapons. They didn’t need to. They were weapons. A tahl is pretty much exactly what you’d get if you specifically designed a giant crab for combat, moulded it into a skinnier shape, and crossed it with a tank. If they had any more natural hooks and spikes and thick panels if chitin armour, they wouldn’t be able to move.

As for the atil, well. I had no idea why they were there. I wasn’t entirely willing to trust Glath’s perspective on everything aljik as he’d pretty clearly absorbed a dohl mindset along with a dohl shape, but he seemed pretty spot-on about the intelligence and capacity of the atil. I’d basically just started thinking of them as biological space roombas, for all that they were nearly my size. To be fair, I hadn’t really had much of a chance to watch them; they tended to run off, terrified, any time they saw me coming. I didn’t know if they had an actually purpose in the raiding party, or if the captain was trying to bulk up her meager numbers. It’d have to be the former, I decided, or she’d be sending some of the drakes instead. (Why wasn’t she sending drakes?)

The ship shuddered slightly with an unseen impact, and the raiding parties made for the access shaft. I reflected, yet again, on how ridiculous this ship was as a pirate ship; one entrance to you bridge made sense in a prison, but here, pirates were queuing for the single door just to do their damn job, and there was only enough room in the shaft for a couple at a time. (Me, I would’ve just had them meet up in the corridor. It’d be cramped and inconvenient without the gravity, but at least your mighty warriors wouldn’t be essentially queuing for an elevator while their targets prepared their defenses.)

Slowly, they left. And the people on the bridge kept doing their normal jobs, as if absolutely nothing was happening. Princess Nemo wired herself back into her action-figure-box pilot’s chair, the drakes kept working at the panels and holding what looked like fairly involved discussions with their tails, the handful of atil still on the deck moved stuff and cleaned stuff. I looked around for something to help me track the invaders, like a video feed or something. If there were any video feeds of anything on the ship, they weren’t displayed in any way that my eyes could understand. And without Glath, I couldn’t ask anyone for information.

Once it was clear that I could neither help anyone nor learn anything by hanging around, I headed off the bridge. Nobody seemed to mind me being there but if I had nothing to do I preferred to do it in a more comfortable air pressure. I headed up into the centre of the ship, and that was when the trouble started.

I was just heading back to my quarters. I wasn’t trying to start trouble.

I swear, nothing that happened next was remotely my fault.

* * *

So they paired us up and moved us out, an easy, routine job. We were lower on soldiers than I’d have liked but we were low on supplies too, and there was no choice but to keep moving. Besides, I trusted the Princess’ orders. Planning stuff like this was what she was there for. If she felt it was safe to send everyone, well, then I’d go with everyone. No problem.

They were only drakes.

So they paired us up and it was me and Kit this time, no Gth, because we had to spread our numbers out, so it was just the two of us and a scrappile of atil for backup. I didn’t like Gth out of my sight; I’d never say so to his face but I don’t think he can really take care of himself, but it was pretty hard to kill an ambassador claw-to-claw anyway and he had another tahl with him, it’s not like he needed me specifically. She’d look after him. The Princess would be pretty mad to lose the ambassador. She likes him for some reason, he has special jobs for her or something.

“Gekt?” Kit asked, checking his knives.

“Hmm?”

“How long do you think we can keep this up, out here?”

I flicked my mandibles at him. “That a dohl question? Don’t matter, Kit. You got nowhere to go while we’re out here.”

“That’s what worries me.”

Kit was always like that. All the dohl were, even Gth. Always thinking about futures we couldn’t change or choices we didn’t have or drawing complicated patterns in their heads about loyalties and strategies and the fitness of their ruler. Seemed kind of pointless to me, especially when we should be focused on fighting.

We led the charge, of course. I used to be in the second team, but I’d taken the top tahl spot from Lif in a quick wrestle four crested moons back, so now it was my party up front. Sometimes I wondered if she’d lost on purpose, because we were about to go into some pretty ferocious battles. If so, her cowardice had cost her more glory than she’d thought, because I hadn’t died in those battles, even at the front, so top spot was still mine.

We pushed our way down the corridor, into the ship of our prey. Gravity kicked in as we crossed between airlocks, dragging us down slightly harder than any aljik is used to, but not enough to be a real problem.

It was smaller than ours, of course. It was a merchant ship, mostly storage space with a small crew; good for us. I lifted my claws, opened my mandibles, and sank into the haze of the hunt, ready to strike at any unfamiliar movement.

Movement behind me, dohl and atil. That was okay. Movement ahead – I struck! The loose wire that had been swaying in the corner of my vision fell to the floor in neat pieces. Fool’s motion – a decoy? No, just fool’s motion. There was nothing else moving.

The doors to either side of us were open. They might be ready to ambush us in the rooms. There would be no point; a drake tail, even a drake jaw, would do nothing to me. We’d have to go, room by room.

“This is going to take too long,” I complained. “Can’t they just come out and fight?”

“There’s barely any cargo in the rooms,” Kit said behind me. “Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

“We’re not here to kill cargo. Let the atil get the cargo.”

“No, I mean, why have they moved it? I think...” Kit found a ship management screen whose power I hadn’t cut. Drakes have a habit of putting management screens all over their ships, which sounds to me like a great way to help your enemy break into your ship. “Ah, yes. The only locked door is to command control. They’ll be huddled in there, with their cargo. It looks like a very strong door.”

“Can we open it?”

“You want me to break drake security and unlock a fortified door? I don’t think our drakes could do it, let alone me.”

“I didn’t ask if we could unlock it,” I said, lifting my claws for emphasis.

“Oh. Uh… perhaps? With time and help?”

“Then I start now, and my sisters can catch up,” I declared, heading off towards the command control centre. Kit hesitated at the panel long enough to leave a message for the other two attach teams before rushing to catch up. We bled atil from out party as we moved, letting them head into side rooms to collect the meager scattering of cargo still present, until we reached the huge, metal door.

“There’ll be three layers of door,” Kit warned me.

“I know how drake doors work,” I reminded him. I charged at the door full-tilt and rammed my claws straight into the metal. The second strike made a dent large enough for me to get a grip, and I started to pull.

Soon, our entire invasion force was clustered around the door, us tahl gripping and dragging, the dohl waiting nervously behind, weapons raised. We were still on the first door, but it was only a matter of time. When the third door opened, the dohl would have to attack and hold the line for the few crucial seconds it took us tahl to disentangle ourselves from the remains, and for those second, they wouldn’t have us as shields. No wonder they were nervous. The atil were even more skittish, milling about like prey ants whose nest entrance had just been blocked.

Wait a minute.

“Hey, everyone,” I said as we dragged the first door open, bit by bit. “Didn’t we bring way more atil than this? Shouldn’t they have caught up by now?”

And that’s when we heard it. Something midway between a screech and a roar, a hundred times louder than any aljik vocal bladder could produce, ten times louder than any drake. It reverberated down the corridor in a pitch that I thought vaguely I might have heard recently, but couldn’t quite place. Then a series of vocalisations complicated enough to be speech, but not a system of speech I recognised.

“That all you got, you whiptailed little fuckers?! Come closer and I’ll show you how to bite someone’s leg properly!”

“What under marshmist is that?” Kit asked nervously.

“Charlie,” Glath said. “Oh, Charlie, that the fuck are you doing now?”

* * *

So anyway, as I was saying, nothing that happened next could be construed in any way as my fault.

I was being good. I was keeping out of the way. If just so happened that, while our entire military force was on the other ship and I was alone in the central corridor, said corridor suddenly filled up with drakes.

At least, I figured they were all drakes. There was a much greater variation in their appearances than I’d been led to expect on the stardancer. Above the normal scaly bat-winged geckos flew giant dragonflies, recogniseable as the same species only by their un-dragonfly-like wings and four whip tails; also racing through the corridors were bigger geckos without wings (or with the ragged remains of them crumbling away like dead bones) and with big, clawed feet, and I saw some kind of long, slender, multicoloured lizard with huge teeth up in the back.

I ran, naturally. Or zoomed along in the zero-gravity corridor, anyway, dragging myself from hatch to hatch. Not fast enough. Something lashed out, and I felt it snag my cheek; a drake tail spur. It dragged its way through my flesh while more tails wrapped around my torso. The spurs pierced my space suit and dug in to hit ribs. I was pulled back towards the advancing lizard army. The pain was… well, I won’t go into details, but I can tell you that being stabbed doesn’t actually feel like a ‘stabbing’ pain. It feels more like a very concentrated punch. This pain was stabbing, sharp. Poison? Were drake spurs poisoned?

I spun, wrapping the tails around my wrist, and yanked as hard as I could, foot lashing out. I launched my heel right for the eyes of the fucker who’d grabbed me. It seemed I could yank harder than I’d thought, because as my foot smashed into the drake’s face, the two tails wrapped around my torso tore off in my hand. I had no time to think about this; there were drakes all around me.

The thing about these particular drakes was, they seemed to have even less experience in zero gravity than I did. Those tails were marvellously dextrous, but I quickly learned that if I could keep my enemies moving, they had difficulty aiming at me and not each other. As fragile as they were, the rest of a drake is decidedly less fragile, and my kicks and punches did very little until I learned what to target – tails, wings, the bodies of the flying dragonfly ones. I shouldn’t realistically, have stood a chance, but they were in each others’ way, they didn’t have any practice moving without gravity, and my space suit offered me some protection against the worst of the spurs.

Heart racing, whole body trembling, I tore at anything delicate enough for me to make an impact. The crowd around me seemed to be thinning; whether I was winning or they were just assembling to fight more effectively, I had no idea. Everything was sharp and bright; my heart raced, my muscles shook. I was distantly aware that this wasn’t really me. A manic voice in my head told me to do things; attack, charge forward, bite at that wing until the fragile bones fracture between your teeth – and I obeyed these small impulses without thinking, and that wasn’t me, that wasn’t… I could run, no, fight; I was winning, I was invincible.

I kicked at one of the bigger lizard’s faces, only for it to sink its teeth straight into my thigh, deeply. I screamed. Or roared. I couldn’t tell. The bigger lizard was backing away.

“That all you got, you whiptailed little fuckers?! Come closer and I’ll show you how to bite someone’s leg properly!” Teeth bared, I zoomed forward. A dragonfly drake darted down to hit me in the face; I tried to bite its leg off. Didn’t work. Ah well.

I was absolutely covered in slashes from drake spurs, some of which were still lodged in my body, dangling from removed tails, but there was very little blood. And the pain… there was either a lot of pain or no pain, I couldn’t tell. My hands and feet were going numb. My heart… was it even beating any more? Those dragonflies, were they decked out in colours never before seen but they human eye, or did I imagine that?

I tried to laugh, but I was breathing too fast to get the sound out properly. I tried to grab and tear, but my hands were no longer responding, or if they were, I couldn’t see and feel well enough to tell. And was that… was that something else behind the drakes, patches of bright red and pale blue and solid shadow in the shape of huge mantises? The drakes were paying far less attention to me now. I wasn’t their biggest problem any more.

Their problem was the aljik forces moving down our narrow tunnel, too narrow for them to fit surely, too narrow for me to breathe; the surviving drakes turned toward me again, not to fight but to flee, and I pressed against the wall to let them; the aljik pursued, a tahl scooping me onto her back as we passed, the two of us taking up the entire tunnel together; the fleeing drakes made it to the filter room, but from there, there was nowhere to go. They could have entered the room, spread out among the pipes, tried to hide. They didn’t. They bunched together, a small and bedraggled group, terrified, and waited for the inevitable. My tahl, who was at the front of the group, raised her claws and advanced.

“Wait!” I cried, launching myself heroically from her back. Or at least it would’ve looked heroic, given sufficient space and gravity. What I actually did was drag myself over her with numb hands, scraping the top of the tunnel, and smack clumsily into a couple of walls before I could place myself as stationary as could be expected between the drakes and the aljik. I also threw up. Which, by the way, is something I recommend never doing in zero gravity. I hope I don’t have to explain why.

The aljik paused.

“You’re not… you’re not going to kill them, are you?” I asked lamely.

The tahl, of course, didn’t understand a word. She raised a claw impatiently to brush me aside.

“Glath, I know you’re back there somewhere!” I called. “Come and translate!”

Spiders poured around the tahl, and suddenly Glath was beside me, in the shape of a dohl. In my current state, with my vision already weirdly sharp and my breathing way slower than my body wanted it to be while I forced my breathing slow enough to actually make words, he looked as solid in shape as anything else around me. He clicked and moved his limbs.

The tahl looked confused.

“Of course she is going to kill them,” Glath told me.

“But they’re helpless.”

This was translated.

“Exactly. That is why they can now be killed.”

“No, they… oh, god, I know you’re pirates and shit and I guess all pirates are gonna be murderers but really? Here?” My vision was starting to swim. I wanted to go for a run, or punch something, or tear the metal from the tunnel wall with my bare hands. Or yell, yelling would be great, if I had the breath for it. “They’re helpless. What… what are you gonna do with their ship?”

“Plunder the goods and set it adrift,” Glath said.

“Then plunder most of the goods and set it adrift with the surviving crew and enough to keep them alive until the next port,” I said.

The tahl clicked irritably.

“She says to stand aside.”

“Tell her that if she wants to kill the helpless she’s gotta go through me.”

“You can’t win against her.”

“Obviously. Wanna see how much damage I can do? Wanna bet whether that damage, and the loss of my life, is worth more or less than the paltry cost of just letting these people go?” I bared my teeth, filled my lungs, raised my voice to a bellow. “Come on, you overgrown, brainless crab! You wanna go?? Do ya??”

Whatever was in those drake spurs was some really good shit. Except for all the numbness and nausea and the heart rate and the probable death, I mean. Now, the thing was, I was a complete fucking mess. That was obvious. My space suit, clothes and flesh were all in tatters, I was dripping blood from multiple teeth and spur wounds, some of which still had spurs (and fragments of teeth) in them. I didn’t seem to have a pulse, or more likely I did and just couldn’t feel it because otherwise I’d be dead, only a few parts of my body were responding at all and those parts were responding with wildly varying levels of force and speed, I could barely see and it was taking most of my focus just to breathe in a way that permitted talking. I wanted to move and do something and had no idea what and even I could tell that all the amazing ideas running through my head were probably very stupid for someone who wasn’t amazing and invincible like I was right then.

But I was banking on neither the drakes nor the aljik knowing most of that. They knew the stories of the humans. The aljik knew I’d saved them from the military, and if I was lucky and aljik stories spread like human ones did, they probably thought I’d done so in some fantastically borderline-superpowered way while tossing clever one-liners. They knew that the drakes had snuck past them onto our ship, and their precious Princess would have been practically undefended if I hadn’t been there to wildly flail and try not to die, and they had no way of knowing that what I had been doing had just been wildly flailing and trying not to die. And here I was, dismembered body parts of my enemies still dangling from my body, and I was ready to fucking go at it with a tahl. Part of me really, really wanted to fucking go at it with a tahl, just because she was pissing me off. I’d rip off that armour with my own hands if I had to. I’d kick her arse. I’d kick everyone’s arse. I’d kick my own arse.

I mean, I had just thrown up in front of everyone, but maybe I still looked badarse enough for this.

Or, y’know, pitiful enough that the tahl wouldn’t want to kill the ship’s precious engineer. Either of those things worked.

There was a discussion among the aljik. They looked a bit confused, so far as I could tell through blurry vision, and the discussion either went for a few seconds or several hours, or more likely some space of time in between that I had no way for tracking. Finally, Glath spoke.

“They will be allowed to return to their ship and disengage,” he told me.

“Good,” I said, and immediately passed out.


	12. Trust

I had thought, hoped, for a little while, that Charlie might be immune to the drake toxin. It had held up remarkably well for far longer than anybody should with just one sting in them, let alone several. But after making its final declaration on the fate of the very drakes that had killed it, it finally collapsed.

The atil carried the body back to Charlie’s ring in the ship while I shifted my form to translate between our crew and the merchant drakes. The atil had already cleared out all the easily accessible goods, so returning enough to help them survive and sending them on their way was a quick process. While the atil cleared away the dead drakes and a couple of their sister atil who had been crushed against the walls, I went to check on the condition of Charlie’s body and tried to figure out how exactly we were going to explain the details of this to the captain. It was for the best, I supposed, that the dangerous human fell here and now, before it could get us into trouble.

The atil had set Charlie’s body against the wall, where it had slumped over awkwardly. There were still drake barbs lodged in it. It was doing something else, too; producing a low, even growl that Charlie had explained to me was called ‘snoring’.

I dashed for the communication panel by the door and called for assistance. Then I dashed back to Charlie, swarming over the human, organising my community to breathe carbon dioxide against the seals of its space suit until they sprang open. Yes, it was breathing; alive. Its skin was colder than normal to the touch, but there was the gentle, rhythmic throb under there that Charlie had called a pule, a sign of blood circulation. The pulse was faster than normal, but it was there. The wounds barely bled, the skin was white, but deep inside, the blood was moving. Charlie’s mouth was going blue, its fingers and toes were almost purple. I had no idea what that could mean.

I fished out Charlie’s laptop and levered it open. I’d watched Charlie access their records enough to know how to use it. I needed human medicine, probably. Biology? Perhaps. I wouldn’t find anything in there about drake venom, but I might find Charlie’s symptoms.

I skimmed through a few files. Most of the words I didn’t know, didn’t think I could translate, and didn’t want to waste time trying. Poisons, allergies, organ failure, immune system… nothing relevant that I could understand.

A couple of atil arrived just as I found what I wanted in a side note on a section of the circulatory system. The lack of bleeding, the colour and temperature changes… blood wasn’t moving properly in the body.

I inspected the body again. The pulse was slowing to a more normal, stable rate, and Charlie wasn’t gasping for air like it was supposed to in this situation. Pinkness was returning to the skin. It was… fighting the poison? It was clearly affected by the drake poison, but it had taken so many shots of it and lasted so long and now it was going to live? Most things with a vulnerable immune system collapsed within minutes.

Charlie’s wounds were bleeding a little more freely, but not much. Reddish blood had dried over the wound, much faster than humidity should have allowed. But the hands and feet were starting to go black. I consulted the text again.

“Hot water,” I ordered the atil. I told them how hot, how much, what to do. Submerging the extremities in hot water should force the blood vessels open more and allow the blood through. If I was reading the book right. Humans produced body heat, and I’d seen Charlie redden and whiten with temperature before. It checked out. But…

But this engineer… this fake engineer… was dangerous. I knew the stories of the Jupiterians and the quarantine as well as any aljik, and I didn’t even know what caste Charlie was, except that it was something smart enough to also fake being an engineer. Charlie had saved us from the military and had probably saved some of our soldiers during our conflict with the drakes, so it was sometimes hard to remember that the human was not, in fact, bonded to our crew in any way. It had blatantly refused the exchange for its service. And the Princess hadn’t asked what it would take in exchange instead.

Perhaps she, like me, suspected that she knew the answer. Perhaps she also thought that the only thing the human would want was a promise of a ride home. That would be a promise that the Princess would never fulfil; the chain of improbable and dangerous events that had brought us in proximity to Earth in the first place would not repeat themselves, and there was no way that the Princess would go back to that area of space by choice. The only option available to her would be, sooner or later, to kill Charlie when it became a dangerous liability. And that, as anybody familiar with Anta’s story knew, would be an absurd risk. If Charlie did not strike against us before such an order came, it would strike after. We could never be really, truly sure that Charlie was helpless or harmless.

Except right in that moment, where it lay unconscious and poisoned after the battle.

The atil returned with a large tub and a pack of hot water. The tub was filled. Charlie was lifted, ready to be dropped bodily into the tub.

I could let them do it. I could claim to the Princess later that I’d misunderstood the directions, that I had forgotten that Charlie would need air to breathe, that I had been trying to save it. She would believe me. An unintended side effect of an ambassador’s physiology is an amazing capacity to lie, as we had to learn to imitate all those little movements and tells that most species do unintentionally. I could choose how honest to look, and nobody could see through it but another ambassador colony. Or Charlie, who had some strange unknown ability to predict the thoughts and moods of seemingly any species, even mine. The translator even had some words for it. I still wasn’t sure whether ‘psychic’ or ‘empathic’ was the correct term for the phenomenon, but whatever it was, it made me feel more vulnerable than I’d felt since walking into my first court. Between that, and the danger, and the sheer amount of time it took out of my schedule to constantly interpret for a single lone member of a species, and the fact that I’d been dead against bringing a human aboard at all…

I could simply let the atil drop Charlie in, and wait.

“Stop,” I said as they lifted Charlie. “Only the ends of its limbs go in. The rest has to be out of the water. Humans breathe air, and I think it might only work if you just put the extremities in.”

Smaller tubs were duly fetched. I used the time to inspect the wounds and see if the barbs could be safely removed from Charlie’s flesh. It seemed that they could – something in Charlie’s blood had dried it out not only faster than the air humidity should have allowed, but also dried it hard, to form thick coverings over the wounds so that they barely bled so long as I was very careful in my extraction. I took the ruined space suit and other body coverings too, just in case any scraps might cause problems in the wounds later.

Then I double-checked the texts, to make sure we weren’t doing anything that would kill the human anyway. Apart from a detail about how a human lying on its back could drown in its own digestive juices, which seemed like a pretty big design flaw to me, I didn’t find much that suggested that we’d be making the situation any worse. Charlie was duly laid on its stomach across a couple of crates, its hands and feet submerged in water just cool enough not to burn. The atil left. I waited, and read.

“Am I dead?” Charlie moaned into the hard plastic of the crate an eternity later. “No, I can’t be. There’s no way being dead could hurt this much. Glath, are you around?”

“I’m here,” I said.

“Good, I’m probably not dead then. I don’t think tiny space spiders and humans get the same afterlife. What the fuck happened? Why do I feel like half a sheep washed up on the side of a creek on a winter morning?”

Time with Charlie had given me a sense of what was and was not worth the time to translate. I dismissed that last sentence as pointless. “You fought multiple drakes, after insisting to me that you were not military. You have been injured.”

“Ugh. Fuck. Yeah, I remember now.”

“I should tell you that… well, drake spurs are venomous.”

“Oh, really? What a surprise. Never would have fucking guessed. My whole body and mind going haywire on me like that in the middle of battle, that was a total mystery, never would have guessed poison. I can’t seem to feel my hands, should I be worried?”

“Probably,” I admitted. “Although they no longer seem to be as black.” The flesh was a pattern of red and purple blotches.

“Black?!” Charlie made to lift its right hand, but its arm wouldn’t lift properly. It lifted its left instead, flattening the hand against the crate and rolling onto one cheek to inspect the flesh. “Ugh, man, this really isn’t great.” It flexed its fingers and screamed. “Aaaargh! Ah, fuck that hurts!”

My community milled. “I can… what can I do?”

“Nothing, pain is good. Pain is so much better than numbness right now. Pain is pretty much the best possible sign.” It gritted its teeth and flexed the fingers again. “Check that out, they move. Brilliant. Now, how long was it black?”

“I do not know.”

“Guess.”

“It was black when I first examined it, so...”

“Ugh, fuck. Well, hope for the best, I guess.”

“Is… is that important?”

“I’d like to know if I’m going to lose any fingers is all. Oh, and also if I’m going to die. On that note, are any of my organs poking out of any wounds? I can’t tell one pain from another at this point.”

“I saw only skin and muscle damage,” I said. “Some of your, um, skeleton? Was hit.”

“Well, arterial wounds probably would’ve bled out by now, I think. So I guess anything that’s going to kill me now is something we probably can’t help.”

“You seem to know a lot about medicine. Are you a doctor?”

“I don’t know shit, I know like five random facts from my sister and the rest is just logic and guessing. How did you know to do the water thing?”

“I read it in your texts. Does the timing matter that much? The hand seems to work.”

“Does your translator give you anything for ‘toxic shock’?”

I checked. “Both of the individual words, but – ”

“How about ‘tourniquet shock’?”

“Again, only the individual – ”

“Okay so, when you cut off blood to something, it starts to run out of oxygen, yeah? And if the tissues run out they’ll start to die. So you need to get oxygen back to it fast enough, no big deal. But blood has two jobs; it delivers and it takes away. Blood that’s sitting in one place doesn’t just run out of oxygen, it fills up with toxins. If you let it sit for too long and fill up too much, then when you send that blood racing back around the body, you flood it with a big rush of toxins.”

“I… I didn’t know.”

“I know that. Now you know for next time I do something totally fucking stupid and a poor clueless alien has to rescue me. Say, do you feel super chill right now, or is that the alien poison talking?”

“You are cold?”

“No, I meant like, calm. I should probably be freaking out right now. I really just want to throw up and sleep.” Charlie tried to raise itself onto its elbows, slipped, and fell sideways off the crates, knocking over one of the water tubs. “Aaah, fuck, that hurts. Heh, those bastards really sliced me up, didn’t they? Look at this shit. I’m surprised I have any blood left. You know what, I bet I pull through all this shit and die of infection or something.”

“There is unlikely to be many things on this ship capable of infecting you,” I pointed out.

“We humans carry around plenty of our own dangerous bacteria, don’t worry about that. Do you guys have a doctor on board who can do stitches? I’m never gonna look pretty with this but I’d like to be able to still use some of these muscles.”

“Stitches?” I asked while attempting to translate.

“Yeah, you know. Sewing wounds closed?” Charlie blinked at me. “Oh, right, you probably just… regrow new spiders or something instead of surgery. But, you know, like how clothes are put together. Or those tapestries in the drakes’ ring.”

“You want to tie together strips of your own flesh?!” I asked.

“No, that’d be… I dunno, weaving? You take a bit of thread and use it to attach one bit of flesh to another. I mean I guess cavemen used flesh, they would’ve used bits of tendon or something, but any thread will do so long as it’s sterile – so long as it’s got no germs on it. The drakes clearly have a textile industry, get one of them.” I was in the midst of trying to translate ‘textile’ when Charlie spoke up again. “Hey, hang on. You must know about stitches. You told be how the Jupiterians do brain implants. Somehow I don’t think they left their victims walking around with gaping head wounds.”

I’d never really thought about it. “I suppose I always assumed that they used a sealing agent.”

“Well if you have a sealing agent that you know will work on human muscle, that’d be great, but otherwise I’m going to need a needleworker in here if you want these arms to be doing any more ship repairs.”

I called for a drake who was good at tapestry work and explained what was needed as best I could. Sulon arrived immediately. In one wing it carried a spool of long, flexible filament made of some sort of hairs all twisted together, and a pointed shard of metal was gripped in the tiny pincer of its dominant tailspur. It attached the implements together, listened to me explain what Charlie wanted, expressed disbelief, and listened to me explain again. While I tried to find a diagram showing a human’s muscles, Charlie cleaned the dried blood from around a nasty-looking side wound, and Sulon jabbed the metal shard into its side.

Charlie immediately screamed and punched Sulon in the eye.

After some fuss in which Charlie, through me, apologised multiple times, and we determined that there was definitely nothing on the ship that could serve to ‘just knock me the fuck out again’ that we were sure wouldn’t poison a human (although I was starting to think that nothing poisoned a human for long), Charlie came up with an alternate solution.

“We need restraints,” it said.

“We need what?” I asked.

“Okay look, I know you yourself don’t have anything to restrain, but this is a prison ship. I’m sure you guys have alien handcuffs or something lying around. Rope will do. Just, like, tie me down to something here, here and here,” Charlie said, indicating several places on its limbs, “so I can move as little as possible and don’t hurt our good doctor friend or fuck up his stitches.”

“Sulon is not a doctor,” I pointed out.

“Not relevant but I really wish you’d stop reminding me of that.”

“You want us to tie you down?”

“I don’t want any of this to be happening at all, but in this situation, yeah, that seems like the best solution. It’s how we used to do it, back before we had proper painkillers. I hear.”

“This is a frequent activity for humans?” I asked while conveying this strategy to Sulon. I wasn’t sure whether to be alarmed or relieved. This probably meant that Charlie was less insane than I’d predicted, but it only confirmed the insanity of the species as a whole.

“Garage surgery for alien spur wounds? No. Surgery in general? Yes. We have great healthcare, it’s amazing. Normally we just knock someone out for this, though; restraints are kind of barbaric and this is gonna be hell but if we don’t have anything else we – hey, can you tell Sulon to tie that rope a bit higher, he’s gonna cut off circulation there. And nothing on the neck, dude, nothing on the neck!”

I duly passed on these messages and got to translating some of the less familiar of Charlie’s words while Sulon tied some much thicker hair-twisted filaments around Charlie, stuck something between its teeth, and got to sewing. My assistance was only required for occasional advice on how a couple of limb muscles matched up; most of Charlie’s wounds hadn’t, according to Charlie, severed anything important, and while healing would take time and might be dangerous, Charlie thought it was ‘fairly trivial’ to simply match up the two sides of the wounds and attach them. (‘Haven’t even broken any ribs; that’s lucky right there.’) With the help of my translator, Charlie’s texts, and a few questions to Charlie, I ended up with a lot of information that I did not understand, and what I did understand seemed ridiculous.

Apparently, tying somebody down for ‘surgery’ had once been fairly standard, although Charlie was quick to explain that surgeries used to be quite dangerous when humans didn’t understand how infections occurred. Surgeries could be used to extract things, such as rotting teeth, entire limbs or, alarmingly, misbehaving organs (‘there’s a lot of stuff in a human body that’s nice to have but we don’t strictly need’). It could also be used to add new things, such as implants for new purposes (explaining why Charlie had not been as alarmed as I had expected when I had tried to explain how the Jupiterians built their translators), and even artificial devices that replaced or assisted the functioning of natural organs. (‘We can put new lenses in eyes, little pacemakers that send electrical signals to someone’s heart if their body doesn’t do it right, stuff like that.’) One thing that I had to be mistranslating, though Charlie obligingly explained it in multiple different ways in an attempt to help me understand, was the claim that in extreme cases, humans would harvest the still-living flesh of other humans to replace or supplement their own failing organs. It must be a misconception on my part. But…

That explained some things, did it not? Most species had violent disputes between their own kind; the borders of aljik kingdoms could be places of heavy conflict if there were enough resources to make it worthwhile, and limiting the food or core tree access for a group of drakes would quickly fracture a peaceful population into violent factions until the issue was resolved, either by finding more resources or simply cutting the numbers down until they were under the resource limit. It was a fact of any aljik Queen’s life that she would eventually be slaughtered by a sister or daughter, and seyedni flower dances would leave the ground stained with rotting corpses for months after the fact. Every species in the Empire had a history of violence, or they would have been destroyed for resources before joining the Empire. But the human capacity for violence, evidenced by the story of Anta’s Voiddancer, the Jupiterians’ observations of the planet, and Charlie’s own actions suggested an aggressive drive far beyond the norm. Did humans survive by harvesting enemy organs when their own began to fail? Was the Earth a giant battlefield, questing for immortality? Was that the reason behind the Jupiterian-created army’s fanatical desire to return home – did they need a supply of organs from younger, fresher humans to stay alive?

Were we killing Charlie, by depriving it of the flesh of its enemies? Was that the exchange that it was holding out for, instead of the money that we had been assured was the standard human exchange? And if it did need the flesh of other humans to survive, how long did we have before that became critical? How long before Charlie would resort to any risk, any danger, to try to return home for those dearly needed organs?

Charlie, tied down, was almost as helpless as when it had been unconscious. It wouldn’t be too hard to think of a way to get rid of Sulon.

I brushed the thought from my community.

I checked the texts again, but most of the information was still incomprehensible to me. I did learn some interesting things about blood. Apparently the agent that carried oxygen in human blood was iron, which was unusual. Rusted metals were a fairly commonly used method of oxygen transport, but it was rare to find an iron-based species, simply because iron was usually quite rare on life-bearing planets. Not earth, it seemed.

Or perhaps that, too, was rare, and humans drank the blood of their enemies to keep their iron levels up.

Also in Charlie’s blood was apparently some sort of chemical that clumped the blood together when in air, which explained why the blood had dried so quickly on its wounds. Several such chemicals, it seemed. So many that there had to be another sort of chemical to keep the blood thin and stop the first lot of chemicals clumping it in the veins, which could cause blockages and kill the human. The concept of having helpful agents in the blood wasn’t a terrible idea, but the idea that dangerous wounds were such a common part of human life that loading the body with these clotting agents and just taking the risk of gumming up the circulatory system was evolutionarily selected for was insane. I had wondered how humans, lacking a thick hide or impenetrable exoskeleton, avoided deep injuries to their vulnerable muscles and organs. Apparently, they didn’t bother avoiding them.

One of the texts also contained a short note about replenishing the blood supply of humans who had lost too much with blood harvested from other humans, which after the organ thing, didn’t surprise me. Apparently there were several types of human blood and only some were compatible with each other to avoid – you guessed it – gumming up the whole circulatory system.

But the most puzzling part was the immune system. I understood almost none of it, but apparently quite a lot of human defense against infection took place in the blood. I asked Charlie about it.

“So there are cells in your blood that kill alien cells?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. White blood cells. I don’t know much about them,” Charlie said as Sulon untied its arms, “but what do you want to know?”

“Well, if the immune system attacks the wrong type of blood, do you have to also be careful about harvesting the correct form of replacement organs?”

“You’re really hung up on this organ donation thing, aren’t you? I’m not a doctor, but short answer… yes. Some organs are, like, super important to get a good match with. I don’t know if that matters with all of them. Heh, look at this, hands and feet almost normal after all that, and look how well all these cuts are holding together… Sulon, you should be a surgeon. But if people get foreign organs, they have to take drugs… um, they take a kind of substance that stops their immune system from attacking the organs.”

“So you take other human organs into yourself, and then poison yourself for the rest of your life to stay alive?”

“Or animal organs.”

“Pardon?”

“They don’t have to be human, I don’t think. I’m pretty sure we can do, like, pig hearts and stuff? Unless that’s just a TV thing.”

I didn’t bother translating the last two sentences of that statement. “And then you just poison your own immune system?”

“I guess that’s one way of putting it, yeah.”

“And these painkillers you were mentioning earlier, the alternative to restraints, they are a poison that interferes with the function of your nerves?”

“I suppose so. I don’t think they really count as a poison if they’re for healing? I mean, they do poison you if you take too much, it’s possible to die if you go nuts with them or are allergic or – ”

“I do not have a translation for ‘allergic’.”

“Try ‘allergy’.”

I tried ‘allergy’. I was even more confused. “So… sometimes your immune system attacks random things, thinking they’re alien cells?”

“Or viruses or whatever, yeah. It gets really crazy with autoimmune disorders, where the immune system thinks the body’s own cells are the enemy.”

I stilled my community. “Why… why would that even be possible?”

“I don’t know, I’m not a doctor. Maybe the body fucks up in teaching the cells what’s what. Maybe they have to be on the lookout for cancer and make a mistake. I don’t know how the system works.”

I translated ‘cancer’. “Sometimes your own cells turn against you by forming large incoherent masses?”

Charlie narrowed its eyes. “Hey, hang on. There’s no way you don’t get – oh, right, cloud of spiders. There’s no way the aljik don’t get cancer. Hell, I bet even your little spiders get cancer, although you may not notice. I’m not… exactly sure how that works for you.”

I thought about this. I had never heard of cancer in the aljik before, but then, I had never studied aljik medicine. Sometimes aljik died; perhaps it might sometimes be cancer. “And how do you treat this condition?”

“A lot of the time we can’t, but sometimes we can through, you know, surgery. Or chemotherapy?”

“I can’t translate that word.”

“Well, um… poison. But it poisons the cancer faster than the rest of the body! When it works properly.”

I couldn’t think of a response to this.

“Or radiation,” Charlie added helpfully.

“Radiation kills cancer?”

“I think it kills everything. But I think it’s meant to kill the cancer first, still? I’m not sure how.”

“Your species is insane,” I said flatly.

Charlie lifted its eyebrows. “How do you treat cancer, then?”

“I don’t.”

“And what do you… well, the aljik I guess, it probably doesn’t apply to you… do if one of their organs is failing?”

“I… assume that they die.”

“You don’t know? Bye, Sulon, thanks for the help.”

“I have never asked,” I admitted, before shifting shape briefly to pass on Charlie’s message.

“So biology is weird, and you hear about it from me and assume it’s a human thing instead of a biology thing? And you assume the aljik die, but think that us finding a way to save lives is more insane than just giving up and dying?”

Now that Sulon was gone and nobody was poking Charlie with metal, Charlie was much more focused. Its eyes were settled on my faux face, but kept skipping over my body, watching the movements of my community inside the movements of my overall form. Telepathy, or empathy, or whatever it was.

“Did you talk to the captain about… you know… our conversation before the drake fight?” it asked.

“What was there to tell? We needed an engineer, and you have demonstrated that you are as good an engineer as can be expected from a pre-spaceflight species. I have nothing relevant to tell the captain.”

Charlie relaxed again. Its face shifted into a smile. “Right, yeah. Wasn’t worried at all. Just making conversation.”

“Why did you insist that we preserve the drakes?” I asked.

“Hmm? What do you mean?”

“Before the poison took you, you insisted that the drakes of our hunted ship be allowed to live.”

“Oh, yeah. Did you let them go?”

“Yes.”

“And you want to know why I didn’t want you slaughtering helpless prisoners for no reason?”

“Yes.”

Charlie blinked at me. “Are you serious? Have I ever told you how much you lot creep me the fuck out, Glath? Well, here’s a tip; when you go around saying you don’t know why slaughtering helpless people for no reason is wrong, that’s why. I mean, I imagine they’re part of the Empire here, right? Being in this space and all. And our captain’s gonna inherit that Empire someday, right, if she’s the Princess? How can she expect an orderly Empire without a little give-and-take with the subjects? You can’t go around wantonly killing people, especially if you think you have the right to rule them, and especially if they were just minding their own business and we attacked them for their stuff.”

“We are not of the Empire right now,” I pointed out. “We are pirates.”

“Okay. I’m gonna… I’m gonna try to phrase this in a way you’d understand. Imagine you’re on a merchant ship, minding your own business, and a big pirate ship comes outta nowhere and starts killing everyone on board for your stuff. What do you do?”

“Attempt to fight or flee,” I responded.

“Right. Now imagine these guys are instead just after your stuff, and you know they’ll kill you in self-defense, but other than that have no interest in hurting you or the rest of the crew. They intend to take almost everything, leave enough for you to get to safety, and go. Now what do you do?”

“Attempt to fight or flee.”

“What about when you’re cornered? When you know you’re gonna lose? When there’s nowhere to go? How do the two scenarios differ now?”

“If the loss of the cargo is a near certainty, then it makes sense to take the action most likely to preserve life.”

“Which is?”

“In the first scenario, fight, because there is no other hope. It may still be possible to scare them off, or win through luck.”

“And in the second?”

“Stay out of the way and do not force them to defend themselves.”

“Good. Other side of the coin. You’re trying to plunder a ship and want to preserve as much of your very limited army as possible. If you’re gonna set the ship adrift when you’re done, which of those two scenarios is best for preserving your numbers?”

“But the scenarios do not match the situation. The drakes posed no threat when you defended them.”

“And we can get into advanced ethics on that another day, but I think you’re missing an important point – they’re not the only ship you’re ever going to plunder, are they?”

“But they are the one we are plundering in the scenario.”

“No, they… okay, look. There have been a lot of human pirates and bandits and stuff, right? And we have… complicated wars, with international laws about what you are and aren’t allowed to do to prisoners and if Kate were here she could tell you all about how those ethics are so effective they’ve been bred into our dispositions and baked into our societies but that’s not important right now, what matters here is the we have a sort of code, right? Keeps showing up everywhere. Now, not everyone obeys the rules; there are a lot of arseholes. But when most people obey the rules, things go better for everyone. There were whole sections of our history where the oceans and roads were full of pirates and they’d kill a lot less people than you’d think. Ships would be boarded, stuff would be stolen, and sometimes people would be pressed into service, but once a ship was caught there was very little fighting against anyone except the military, or ships with really good protection. There were even special flags to fly, you know, big signals you could attach to your ship, that basically meant ‘we’re here for you stuff but we’ll let you live if you don’t fight’. And because most people tended to obey these rules, way less people died. Ships got a reputation, if they were trustworthy. People gave in without a fight and survived, and the pirates survived too, because they didn’t have to fight. But… this is the important thing… it only worked because people obeyed the rules. You get nothing immediate from letting those drake go, other than not just fucking murdering a bunch of people… but if you had’ve let a lot of previous ships go, they probably wouldn’t have done something stupidly risky like the attack they pulled, and I wouldn’t be covered in slashes, and those atil wouldn’t be dead. And if you let more go, and word spreads, you won’t have to deal with that kind of shit nearly so often.”

“And… that will work?”

“I kind of thought it was already in place, but judging by how baffled you are by the idea, I’m starting to have doubts. If everyone out here is just a wanton fucking murderer then no, this one ship being weird about it might not mean anything, unless drake are really, really gossipy. To be honest I’m kind of having a hard time with the concept that this is news to you.”

“I am having a hard time with the idea that you have such a complex system in place just for piracy.”

“It’s not just for piracy, it’s for everything. Surrender in battle, crime prevention and punishment, trade, diplomatic negotiations, the rights of children and prisoners and other helpless parties. Nothing works without it. I mean, people ignore the rules all the fucking time and go off shooting helpless people in the face and slaughtering civilians and whatever, but they’re not supposed to. The concept itself isn’t complicated. It doesn’t even require much intelligence, really. Almost the whole animal kingdom does it, in their own way.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m probably oversimplifying. There’s… I don’t understand most of your logic, so it makes sense that you don’t understand mine. I think we’re missing quite a bit of common ground to build our foundations on. I don’t know why, but I… kind of thought space would be different.”

“Different?”

“There’s no way I’d be able to explain. I… need to rest. And heal.”

I left the human to rest.

There wasn’t much else that I could do.


	13. A Call Into the Void

Turns out being a space pirate sucks.

Sitting there alone on the floor of my ring, naked and in pain that was only becoming more distracting as the flesh-sewing endorphins wore off, I tallied up all the various ways that my life was in immediate probable danger, and that I couldn’t do all that much about.

Infection was probably a big one. Also, potential internal injuries.

The drake venom. I seemed to have mostly recovered from that, unless the overall weakness and fatigue was related to that as well as the more probably shock and blood loss, but it was a venom never before tested on humans and could be killing something vital inside me.

Starvation or poisoning. There was no way to verify if the foot-tasting jerky was actually safe.

Military. I was pretty much certain they’d kill me if they realised I was human.

Oh, and my own crew. They were really starting to give me the creeps. It wasn’t just Glath, and his apparent inability to understand the concept of mercy – our modern systems of proper treatment of the helpless were, after all, a cultural thing, that came and went with the times. In many societies, simply slaughtering anyone with the wrong king or wrong god or who was simply in the way had been considered perfectly acceptable behaviour, and we had our fair share of serial killers and deranged sadists and whatnot running around, so it wasn’t like the Pure and Idealistic Paragon of Human Behaviour I’d tried to push had as much basis in reality as I’d wanted it to. It was super fucked up that I was apparently on a ship full of violent sociopaths, but well, there was a fair chance of visiting violence upon helpless victims simply from the circumstance of being pirates. Although I still didn’t entirely understand the greater context of the society that we were being pirates in.

No, what got me was the thing that had been bugging me since the beginning. Nobody on this ship seemed to be able to conceive of people who weren’t like them, or in Glath’s case, weren’t what he was trying to imitate. I couldn’t fault Sulon’s stitching, but laying tied under that needle had been one of the most terrifying experiences of my life; more terrifying than the fighting, than the jumping through space, than running from Glath when I’d first been abducted, because the whole time he looked at me like I was a complicated sewing project, a few bits of delicate material that had to be attached at the right tension in the right order. I’d thanked him when he left, and I knew that Glath had translated it, but he hadn’t seemed to know what to do with the information. Maybe… maybe I was mistranslating alien body language, maybe it was my fault for looking for human cues when I didn’t know what the alien cues were, but the longer I spent on the Stardancer, the more I felt utterly, impossibly alone. Glath’s sudden, invasive burst of curiosity about my biology had been the closest thing to an actual connection anybody had tried to make with me in… how long? A week? Two?

I sucked a lollipop slowly and sipped some water, hoping to alleviate some of the dizziness I felt. The pain, I couldn’t do much about. I did have quite a few panadol in my car, but taking a blood thinner seemed like a poor choice right then. Besides, I might need it in the future for thinning blood. I could deal with pain.

God, I needed to talk to someone. Generally I was pretty antisocial, but it’s easy to be antisocial when you have to communicate with people every day. I needed Facebook. Or Siri. I’d have a conversation with Siri about then.

I checked my phone. Nothing useful functioned without a network, of course.

Which left me with very little to do but sleep, and heal.

* * *

Space was quiet for some time. Charlie’s wounds began to heal, leaving long marks where the skin had knit together, the soft flesh repairing itself much more easily than a thick hide would be able to do and achieving feats simply impossible for an exoskeleton. I checked in occasionally to make sure the human wasn’t dying and organise food and a new space suit for it, and otherwise left it alone. I had a lot of work to do, translating between the different species on board, but I couldn’t help but be distracted by… well, everything.

How did an aljik body work? What did a drake do if its organs started to fail? What was wrong with the exchange we’d offered Charlie, why did the drakes make their tapestries, why were tahl and dohl nearly identical when every other caste was so visually distinct, why did drakes need so many tails? Why had the Jupiterians been so obsessed with the humans? Why did the Kohrir, the large behemoths who had been slumbering since we had taken the prison, still sleep, and how had anybody gotten them into their cell when they were too big for the access shaft? How had anybody gotten Charlie’s car in, for that matter? I am not an incurious community by nature – I’d argue that I had more of a drive to explore and problem solve than most ambassador colonies. Most would not be able to handle the work of shifting shape so often for translation, and I could never spend decades imitating a small patch of unchanging grass like some of my brethren. But questions were to solve problems, find risks. Suddenly, I was full of them, and I didn’t know why. Were there really that many risks? What sort of danger was I picking up on subconsciously, that I needed so much information for?

Well, there was only one good way to find the answers to such questions.

I didn’t want to practice in our ring or the bridge. I didn’t think anyone would ask what I was doing, but I still felt… awkward about it. I headed for the filter room, where nobody goes unless they need to access the airlock or a pipe needs repairing. I swarmed over a filter.

Now then.

Two hindlimbs – legs – tipped with toes. Three joints above the toes; heel, knee, hip. How did they move? I tried to recall the bone and muscle diagrams from Charlie’s texts, but seeing images in two dimensions had never really made a lot of sense to me. It was hard to extrapolate depth from a picture. I tried to simulate the tissues, lining up parts of my community to hold rigid positions as ‘bones’, layering more over the top as ‘muscles’ to pull and push the bones around. I experimented with this setup… no, I was doing something wrong; this wasn’t how Charlie moved. I was sure I had the tissue layouts correct, the joint movements properly restricted. Was the force wrong? Too much? Too little? It felt like both at the same time, somehow…

A little more experimenting, and I hit on the solution. The muscles pulled just fine, but pushing made everything wonky. To move something the other way, I had to relax the muscle and pull the opposite one. That explained why there were so many.

Pelvis… tricky to simulate, but I did my best. Spine, which provided the core of the body and a channel for nerves to safely travel down, from the absurdly oversized brain to the rest of the system. Could I simulate that; could I send my signals, do my thinking, from one place like that? Probably not. I’d never tried to imitate a body on this level before. It had never seemed necessary. Usually, I focused on simulating the outer appearance, even when simulating a dohl.

Ribcage. Inside here… inside here were the gas exchange and blood pumping systems. A heart; a hard ball of muscles that worked in coordination to pump through four chambers. Lungs; huge sacks made from of millions of tiny sacks, arranged to expose as much of the blood-filled membranes that lined them to the air as possible. I didn’t physiologically need that sort of thing, but I tried to imitate the shape of the tissues as well as I could.

Someone was coming.

I reshuffled my community into my normal dohl shape before Charlie came into view. It was dressed in its new space suit, including the belt, but seemed to have left its helmet behind.

“Are you going outside?” I asked.

Charlie started. “Oh, hi Glath. No, I’m not going anywhere, I just hate being naked. It’s a human thing. Sorry, I didn’t think anyone was in here.”

“Do you need help with something?”

“No, I was just getting out of my ring for a bit. I figured I’d go watch people on the bridge but...” it shrugged. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Alright then.” Charlie turned to leave again, but hesitated in the doorway. “Glath, where did you come from? Why are you here?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Yeah, I thought that might be the case.” It pushed forward.

“You need something,” I said, impulsively, before it left. What did it need? More food? Medicine? Something it didn’t want to ask directly for.

“Nothing you can give me.”

“Whatever it is, we may be able to craft a simulation.”

“No. You can’t. I need humans.”

“There was organ damage in the fight?!” I asked, alarmed.

“What? Maybe? What does that have to do with anything? I need… ugh, fuck, there’s no way to explain it to someone like you.”

“I am becoming more proficient at your language every time we interact.”

“Oh, my language, sure. In that case, maybe you can answer something for me.” Charlie turned to face me and pushed itself closer. There were tears in its eyes. “Why doesn’t this ship have some kind of bar? Or, maybe you guys don’t drink, but… some kind of common room?”

I had no translation for ‘common room’. I checked for meanings of ‘bar’, beyond the sort of iron rod that Charlie had replaced shortly after coming aboard; apparently it was a building for indulging in another kind of controlled self-poisoning. “Ah,” I said. “You need painkillers still.”

Charlie blinked at me. “What? No, that’s not even close to what I… you don’t have a gathering point. Anywhere. Do you? Everyone has their own quarters. There’s the bridge, where the captain usually is, but I never see anyone there except people who are working there. I’ve been on this ship for… I don’t know, it has to have been at least a couple of weeks, right? And I still haven’t met all the species here. I still haven’t met the other engineer! And nobody thinks that’s weird! Nobody talks to me except you, and you’re a… you’re like a frighteningly excellent chatbot that was somehow designed by a shitty chatbot.”

“I do not understand what some of those words – ”

“Okay, look. Do you know what this is?” Charlie drew a device from its belt.

“You have called it a phone in the past,” I said, while I checked for the definition of the word. “It is a communication device. Does it… does it function out here?”

“Obviously not, or I would’ve called home when you abducted me. But do you know what it would do, if I were in range of Earth’s network? It would talk to me. I’d say ‘Siri, how do I avoid being abducted by a bunch of fucking sociopaths in the middle of nowhere?’ and a little voice in the phone would tell me, or tell me it didn’t know. And if I joked with it, it would joke back. If I asked it about the meaning of life it’d say something about the number 42, probably, and if I asked it about other programs that do its job it would pretend to get jealous, not because it has any intelligence but because the humans who made it programmed it to do that. They knew that humanity wouldn’t accept anything less. That’s what we are, Glath. Since long before we had writing or science, we thought that the entire universe was talking to us. We saw spirits in the stones and the rivers and the animals, and we spoke to them and waited for responses; we built gods above and spoke to them, we learned how to talk to other animals and co-evolved with some of them, domesticating both them and ourselves so that we could properly bond, properly talk to each other. When we built our AIs, we designed them so that we could pretend they were talking to us, and even when our computers and cars are voiceless, we croon and encourage and shout at them as if it matters. Do you know what Voyager 1 and 2 are? Plug those names into your fancy fucking space translator. They’re probes that we sent out to study the stars, and on them, we put information. Scientists spent ages putting together the perfect message, trying to come up with the most universal methods of communication they could, trying to decide what was important, and they etched those things into records of gold and flung them into the stars, telling anybody who came across it who we were and what we looked like and where we lived, a… a message in a bottle flung into an endless sea on the vague hope that maybe someday, somebody would find it and read it and come and say hello. We built droids to go where we couldn’t, and named them things, like, well, like Voyager. Like Discovery. Like Pioneer and Messenger. There’s a program called SETI; do you know what they do? They record radio data from space and sift through it looking for anything, anything that could possibly be a sign of intelligent life using electromagnetism to talk. They’re doing on purpose what the Jupiterians did by accident; they’re looking for other people who sing in light. There’s a whole program where ordinary people can set up their home computers to crunch SETI’s data, to get through it all. They’re looking for something to engage with, someone to talk to; we found everyone on our planet and now we’re looking further, looking for a community to speak to our community. And it’s dead out there, of course, because of your stupid cordon or quarantine or whatever, but you know what? I’m glad. I’m glad that those people can hold onto their hope rather than actually be out here and know for sure that the galaxy is just fucking dead and lifeless for sure. You guys might be intelligent, technically speaking, but we get more out of our shitty artificial chatbots.” Charlie stopped. It was breathing hard, its voice having steadily rose in volume over the speech. I was furiously trying to keep up on my translations.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Am I missing a factor in my communications in your language?”

“Are you missing a...” Charlie laughed quietly. “For fuck’s sake, Glath. Okay. Here’s a factor. Does the aljik language have sex-based grammatical gender? I mean,” Charlie continued when I started to translate this, “do the aljik have words like ‘he’ or ‘she’ based on whether they are male or female? I’m guessing they don’t, right? See, I thought about it, and I don’t know much about the aljik but that doesn’t seem to make sense. If they have grammatical gender, it’s probably caste-based, right? Each caste is single sex, so you wouldn’t have, like, a gender for Queen/tahl/atil and one for dohl/kel/whatever, would you? They probably each have their own.”

“That is…. broadly correct, so far as it is possible to make comparisons between the languages.”

“So why do you call everyone who isn’t aljik ‘it’?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, at first I figured you just didn’t get how grammatical gender worked in my language. But that’s obviously not the case, because you use it perfectly accurately for aljik. You can parse aljik castes into my two-gender system no problem, so why aren’t the drakes or humans or Jupiterians or anyone else included? Even if a species doesn’t have two sexes, ‘they’ is an option to talk about people, but you use ‘it’. Don’t think I didn’t notice. Even for humans, and it’s our fucking language, and your job is to talk to different species! You’re the best communicator on this ship, but you’re mimicking the aljik there, aren’t you? The drakes are the same. It’s like there’s something… something set, instinctive, about communication, like everyone’s form of body language is baked into them, and they either can’t conceive of anyone speaking differently or they don’t care to try. Everyone here treats other species how I’d treat a stone or a table, like… like they’re just background resources, if slightly complicated ones. No wonder the idea of a multi-species empire – which has been present in human fiction for basically ever, by the way – is such a big fucking social revolution to you guys; I honestly can’t figure out how it functions at all. You want to know what I need, Glath? I need PEOPLE whom I can TALK TO. It’s a psychological necessity for my kind, but you lot took that away, didn’t you? And I don’t even know the first thing about you. I don’t know why a Princess is out here pirating instead of preparing to take over from her mother or whatever, I don’t know why a bunch of drakes have agreed to work for her when she clearly doesn’t give a shit about them, I don’t know where you guys found a literal bag of American cash or how you got my car up here without breaking anything, and I certainly know nothing whatsoever about you, even though you’re the only person I can talk to here. How do you even make any sense? Do you have a society of your own? You’ve said before that ambassador colonies can’t stand to be near each other, so… how did you guys even get into space in the first place if you can’t work together? Did you piggyback on another intelligent race on your planet or what? Why the fuck are you out here, on a pirate ship, doing a job you clearly hate given to you by someone you don’t think respects you and whose decisions you openly mistrust? I suppose none of that matters, does it? You need someone to replace iron bars and not die while there’s still engineering to be done, and that’s the end of the matter, isn’t it?”

Charlie crossed its arms and glared at me, signalling a request for a response. But before I was even a quarter of the way through translating all of the new terms, it spun and pulled itself away down the corridor.

* * *

Sometimes, I liked to lie on the hood of my car and watch the stars.

Recreating the night sky I’d left behind hadn’t actually been all that difficult. I knew how to use the lighting system, and I had the photos I’d taken on my last night on Earth. So long as I kept it dark enough that I couldn’t see the floor, put the temperature down to simulate the night, and didn’t look to the sides where the curving floor meant I couldn’t place any stars, I could sort of pretend I wasn’t on a spaceship.

It probably wasn’t fair for me to run off and yell a bunch of nonsense at Glath like that, but right then, I didn’t care. Everything still hurt and there was a muscle in my right arm that didn’t work right any more; I think it had been cut through and we hadn’t stitched it properly. I was bored out of my mind a lot of the time and the loneliness was just about killing me and frankly, I didn’t have the patience to play nice with anybody right around then.

The door opened. I could tell from the weirdly light footsteps that it was Glath. Everyone else was taken aback by the strength of the gravity and tended to stomp around the place, but Glath had no problem flying and kept his footsteps about the same no matter what gravity he was in. Seemed like a bit of an oversight for a master imitator to me.

A dark, vaguely human-shaped sillhouette formed on the car hood next to me. I hadn’t seen Glath as a human for quite some time, and he’d become much better at it in the interim. I shuffled over to give him some room.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“To tell you a story that nobody has heard,” he said. “Do you know how many times I have been asked where ambassador colonies come from?”

“How many?”

“None, until today. I have never heard of any colony being asked that question.”

I glanced at him, but it was hard to read the movement of his spiders in the darkness. “Are you telling me that you guys just wander about in everybody else’s business and they let you without asking where you’re from or why?”

“Many social species find us very useful, and nonsocial species are not in a position to reject as there is nothing to reject us from. Some do reject us, especially if we cannot imitate their modes of communication, but we find enough.”

I imagined a flying spider colony showing up on Earth in a business suit and trying to blend in in an office.

“The story begins with a… I do not know if your language has a word for it. It is possible that humans are not aware of the existence of the phenomenon. I suppose that ‘planet’ is a sufficient approximation. An area of spacial stability sufficient for populating… well, your biology texts present slightly conflicting criteria for ‘life’, so the term may not...”

“There’s a place with maybe-life on it, got it.”

“A ‘place’ is… you have to understand, I am speaking of an area where the physics to which we are accustomed does not quite apply. Gravity is vast and matter is different. An in this place, there lives, whether alive or not, intelligence. Small intelligences, like cells, building bigger ones, like my community members, building bigger ones still, like me or you, and even bigger ones like a society… one could argue that the planet contains a billion people, or one single person, depending on your perspective. And those people are, by nature, curious. They found and catalogues everything they could in their home, and moved to the very borders of their space, spreading. Colonising. They observed everything that existed and catalogued it, became part of it, understood it. At some point, you run out of new data. There’s nothing to work with but old data, dissecting what is known into smaller and smaller pieces to understand their connections more fundamentally. But then, something truly amazing happened.

“Something new arrived in the universe. Something from… something made of matter moved into their… area… and existed for a few brief moments before losing all coherency. They were able to take data and observe a whole new type of energy organisation. It was as if the entire universe had doubled – there was normal nature, and this strange new organisational method from outside it. They studied, with their limited data; they learned and they extrapolated, and eventually they progressed to trying to build things that could exist in the manner of this matter. They copied it, at first, and pushed their copies out into the universe at large. It took a very long time to construct something that would keep existing out there, let alone do anything. But over time, they were able to build things in this new area, things that could observe and then return so that they could examine them in the moments before their annihilation. They found that their entire universe was a tiny, negligible fragment of what actually existed. They saw strange things out there. They saw strange assemblies of energy making strange shapes and gravitational distortions. After a lot of observation of some particularly erratic materials, they hit upon the insane idea that the characteristics of, for want of a better term, ‘life’, could be encoded into matter, and had been by the universe. They found matter that had intelligence encoded into its particle interactions. They wanted to communicate, they wanted to learn, they wanted to be a part of this fantastic new universe. But they couldn’t. They couldn’t head out into the universe at large without being instantly destroyed by it. They couldn’t bring anything to them and have it last longer than the moment it took to dissect and analyse. They had no way to interact with this universe, so they built one.”

Even in the darkness, I could see Glath’s edges blur as his spiders milled about. It was as restless as I’d seen him since the day we’d first met.

“They knew what they were. They knew how intelligence was encoded into matter. They simply had to merge these two forms of knowledge. There was a lot of work, a lot of patient construction; they had very limited means of interacting with matter, so simply building the orbital platforms and the systems to do the work for them must have taken eons in your time. And building existing life from scratch is a long and difficult task, let alone inventing something new. There were a lot of failures before even a basic prototype was ready, and a lot more before something hardy enough to launch was complete. There were many improvements in the system from that time until the time I was built, and there will be more after I return with my knowledge to integrate into new generations. We were built with simple instincts and simple guiding rules: go out there, and be a part of the universe. Be our ambassadors. Experience what it is like to be one of the things out there, and then come back and tell us.”

“And my tell them, you mean dive into this weird non-matter pocket thing so they can analyse what’s left?”

“Eventually, yes.”

“That’s fucked.”

“Why? Every species dies. Your body will wear out eventually. Mine will wear out quite a lot all at once.”

I couldn’t help snorting a laugh at that.

“Charlie… every species is different. My own kind are, perhaps, lucky in that we do not require other ambassadors to be happy. Most social species are very different. I am sorry that you do not have other humans out here to speak to.”

“Not humans, necessarily,” I sighed. “I guess… I guess I just expected other life to be more like us, you know? Communication is… really important for humans. When we dream of life beyond the stars, if we’re not dreaming of enemies coming to kill us – which does happen – we dream of peers, new friends, new people with new ways of life who we can talk to and celebrate existence with, and… well, the idea of being recognised as a person is just kind of important to us, psychologically.”

“You have one advantage over my creators in that regard. At least you can physically interact with other life.”

“Yeah. That’s true.” I tried to imagine how lonely it would be, to communicate with other life so intimately that you were in effect the only intelligent mind out there. And then to find others. And to be unable to speak with them. “I figured you were called ambassadors because of the sort of stuff you’re doing for Captain Nemo here.”

“It is work to which we are naturally suited, but no. Our ability to bridge the gaps between species by communicating with each other is employed a fair bit in this Empire, because of how Anta designed it, but in most places such skills are not considered important to us. Many of use choose to emulate something incapable of communication.”

“Everyone can communicate.”

“But not everything can, except in the sense that it communicates its existence by taking up space.”

“You mean you guys imitate non-intelligent stuff? Like rocks and chairs and shit?”

“Unintelligent life is more popular, but there are some ambassador stones and rivers about. Most species do not delineate those groups as sharply as I am beginning to understand that humans do. Your species is very confusing. Or that may simply be the small sample set.”

“Confusing how?”

“You speak about the importance of intelligence, about how you want to communicate with intelligent life, when an hour ago you were telling me about how your ancestors would ascribe personhood to stones and trees and stars, and about how now you do it to a voice in your phone. Is intelligent life important or not?”

“I don’t know, man. I think we’re just primed to see it everywhere. We want to find people to talk to everywhere, and if we can’t, we make them. Can your translator handle the work ‘anthromorphisation’?”

A translating rustle. “Ah. Yes. I think I understand.”

“Do they do it? Aljik and drakes and stuff?”

“I don’t think so.”

I sighed. “Thought not.”

“You are disappointed by very strange things.”

I chuckled. “Dude, I’m an alien. You gotta expect me to be a bit weird.”


	14. This Is My Crew

I told myself that I could afford the luxury of feeling sorry for myself while my body finished healing, and then it was right back to work on Project: Get Home. In actual fact I didn’t even have that long, because the thing about trying to heal from multiple injuries of unknown severity without a doctor around is that you kind of have to doctor yourself. There seemed to be no obvious lasting effects from the drake toxin, which was a bonus. It might be secretly killing my liver or something, but the doctors were just going to have to deal with that when I got home. The stitches were a little more complicated, because I had no idea when to take them out. I didn’t want to risk taking them out before the wound had healed properly, but if they were left in too long, didn’t the flesh heal into them or something and make them stay there forever? I stressed over this for a couple of days, poring through my stolen textbooks, before it occurred to me that everything was moving around perfectly fine with the stitches still in so there was no practical reason to fear them staying in forever. I was already a cosmetic nightmare of battle scars, a few bumps of leftover thread weren’t going to matter. I shrugged and made a mental note to snip off the tops of them when everything was completely healed. There didn’t seem to be any sign of infection either, which was… really weird, actually. I could sort of buy Glath’s claim that space bacteria probably wouldn’t infect me, given the evidence, although it seemed to me that if the sugars and proteins I could digest were close enough to the ship’s standards to be so easily produced then their bacteria should be able to eat those sugars and proteins inside me too, but surely the bacteria I’d brought with me to space should be doing something. Bits of my clothes and skin and stuff had to have been forced into my wounds, didn’t they?

Eh, it probably wasn’t important. Of more concern was the one thing that didn’t seem to be healing well; one of the muscles in my upper right arm. I could tense it like any other, but when I did, it didn’t lift my arm up like it was supposed to; it just kind of all bunched up, popeye-style. I was going to have to do something about that.

I told Glath what I needed, and was shortly after provided with some wide straps and a length of strange cable that shrank when a current was run through it. I salvaged a rechargable battery from my cameras and, with some fiddling over the specific placement of cables over my shoulder and elbow, was able to rig up a sort or prosthetic muscle to strap over my skin. The tricky part was limiting the amount of power going to the cable; while a superstrong arm would be awesome, snapping my own bone in half by forcing it to take an impossible amount of pressure sounded like a really stupid mistake to make. By the time I’d figured out how to regulate the power based on the tension in my broken muscle and how to limit it to slightly below the maximum power my working muscle on my left could exert (just to be safe), I hated the entire field of physics, and electrical engineering in particular.

It was also super weird to use. It didn’t work exactly like my muscle had, and it took a bit to learn how to control my arm properly again. I kept worrying that some kind of electrical fault would surge a bunch of power down the cable and completely wreck my arm, and while “fault in homemade prosthetic” would make a pretty cool story for why I didn’t have a right arm any more, it wasn’t something I wanted to experience.

But I healed, and did this, and felt sorry for myself. And then I got back to work. Physical work at first – the remaining aljik engineer had done what he could in my absence, but there were some repairs he couldn’t reach on his own that were waiting for me to heal. And then, social work.

I couldn’t keep relying on Glath to translate everything for me. I couldn’t just sit around and bemoan my fate and whine about how nobody else was human enough for me. I had to stop treating Glath like a personal assistant and get off my arse and go do things for myself, even if he thought it was impossible and nobody else seemed to understand the very concept. I didn’t care what it took; I was going to talk to people. Because the idea that they were incapable of socialising outside their little groups just had to be bullshit.

Unpracticed? Definitely. Not mentally inclined? Probably. But humans aren’t mentally inclined for mathematics, and when we started living in big groups where proper tallies and currency was necessary, we’d put our big people shorts on and invented a methodology for it. We weren’t naturally inclined to view the world logically or rationally, but when the reliability of the methodology had become apparent, we’d developed systems of rules to help us do it. We’d started to categorise our fallacies and common pitfalls, started to dissect what worked and what didn’t and why, and as a whole we were still pretty shit at it but we were able to approximate it well enough to take shuffling steps forward in figuring out the universe. There were hundreds of things that humans weren’t naturally gifted for, that we couldn’t properly visualise and calculate, that we’d invented workarounds for; we’d translate it into a form we could understand, and do our best, until we found a way that worked.

Well, these people could do the same. They understood Glath. They understood the readouts of their computer systems. So they could learn to understand me, even if we had to learn each others’ body language by rote.

And I had my first couple of targets lined up already. For the aljik, I was going to actually meet my fellow engineer, Tyzyth, and have some sort of practical work-related conversation with him. And for the drake, I was going to track down Sulon and thank him for the stitches myself.

‘This plan will be the most difficult thing I’ve attempted in years,’ I reflected while trying to replace a piece the size of a sewing needle in a moving rotor of very sharp blades on the outside of the ship without losing any of the moving parts into the void of space. I was learning a lot more about how some of the bulkier parts of the ship operated, although its actual means of propulsion and control were still a bit of a mystery. It was the sort of knowledge I’d need to communicate with Tyzyth. And, you know, do my job. Was it my job if I wasn’t getting paid?

Wait, was I a slave?

Not a useful question. The important things were making space friends, figuring out where home was and how to steer a ship there, and not dying. Social and economic theory of my culture vs. the patchwork of alien cultures on the ship could wait until some kind of common ground in communication existed.

I decided to start with Sulon, because the drakes didn’t freak me out as much as the aljik, although I’d been pretty twitchy about their tails ever since the fight. The Stardancer drakes were harder to tell apart than the aljik, who conveniently splactered gems all over their faces in individual patterns, but there were minor variations in wing colour and scale growth and things like that that allowed me to pick out a handful of the onces I saw most often on the deck. I’d had plenty of time to learn what Sulon looked like while he stitched me up. I knew he worked the computers on the bridge sometimes, so I just dropped in down there every now and then and watched the drakes, hoping to catch him.

Some of the friendships between the ship’s drakes started to become clear as I slowly made sense of their body language. I’d hung around on the bridge enough that they mostly ignored me, which made them much easier to observe, and the amount of ease in their communicative tail flicks changed a lot depending on who they were talking to. A couple of friends chatting was vastly different to somebody tersely passing on bad news to a colleague, and I learned to tell the difference even without knowing any of the language. I wasn’t able to discern any kind of formal heirarchy among the drakes; I couldn’t tell who was whose boss, or if that was even a concept that existed for them. I’d have to ask, once I could speak to them. It had become a sort of point of pride for me that I wasn’t going to ask Glath; I was going to get this information myself, dammit. Besides, Glath was as biased an observer as I was, and I didn’t think filtering information through two levels of bias was going to help anybody.

I had no hope of decoding the drake language on my own – I probably wouldn’t have understood a lot of their work chatter even in English, and there was no guarantee I was even physically capable of perceiving all the levels of communication that were being used – but I was able to determine a few ‘phrases’. Most conversations started with the same greeting and ended with the same farewell. There were clear gestures used if the captain was approaching, or if somebody was sending somebody else to go and talk to her, and a separate gesture that, based on the glances and stares that followed it, I determined probably referred to me. I filmed conversations with my phone and watched them at night, practicing the language myself. A lack of tails made it a little difficult, but I eventually found that I could clumsily replicate a lot of the gestures with my hands, using a thumb or index finger for each “tail”. I didn’t quite have the dexterity to pull off some of the gestures, but if I could just manage to get the drakes to see what I was trying to do, I figured that we could probably reach a compromise.

“You realise that I could speak to them and help you establish a code system?” Glath asked one day, having walked in on me practicing gestures.

“That’s not the point,” I said. “This isn’t about finding a more convenient way to impart information when you’re not there. It’s about talking. I need… I mean, yeah, that could work, but it would be way better if I can do it, because then I know I’ve got them to listen to me, you know? I want to talk to them like people, not… not like learning to read a computer readout.”

“That makes no sense to me.”

“Most of what you do makes no sense to me either. What do you need?”

“I am here to tell you that we may have engineered another form of food that will not kill you.”

“I can eat something that isn’t foot jerky? Glath, I’d hug you if you weren’t a cloud of spiders with questionable physical integrity.”

“Your food is neither jerked, nor is it made from the feet of anything. But you did mention that a human diet benefits greatly from variety.”

“So does a human brain. I was just about ready to find an oxygen planet and go down there with a spear and start hunting dinner.”

Glath rustled in translation. “You kill things with a primitive blade weapon?”

“I never have, but for some variety I would’ve learned. What have you got for me? Is it less stinky?”

“A crate will be delivered in… one point six hours, approximately.”

“That’s weirdly precise for an ‘approximately’, but thanks. Is this right for the tail positions for ‘hello’?”

“Move your right thumb a little lower. Do you think they will understand?”

“Guess we’ll find out. It’s the phrases with wing twitches that are going to fuck me over.”

“I am sure that you will think of something.”

“Yeah, probably. Is it normal to go this long without raiding a ship or running from the military or something?”

“Space is quite large. Besides, you would surely want to heal all the way before charging off to dramatically avoid death in another conflict that you shouldn’t be part of?”

“Hey, banter. You’re getting better at human communication every day. Hold this phone up for me so I can copy the gestures.” I dropped the phone into the spiders. Glath held it up, accidentally closing the video in the process. I sighed and went to pull it up again.

“Who are the humans on your phone?”

“What? Oh, the phone background. You’ve seen that loads of times.”

“Yes, but who are they?”

“My boys. Uh, my sons, I mean.” I tapped each of their smiling faces. “Derek’s the older one. He’s nine. Keith’s six. Or maybe seven now? Depending on how long we’ve been gone.”

“They are not your caste?”

“What? No, humans don’t work like that, remember? They’re children, they haven’t, ah, chosen their castes yet.”

“But their colourations are different to each other.”

“They have different fathers. Humans get their skin and hair colour from their genetic parents. Derek’s dad was an arsehole to doped me in a bar and never left a forwarding address. He had white skin… pink skin, I mean… like me, and blond hair, so Derek is pale and his hair is a mix his Dad’s blond and my Mum’s, which you can’t see in my hair because of my Dad’s brown. Keith’s father was my husband, Lewis, who had very dark skin, so his skin is darker than mine.” Glath was rustling a lot, so I paused to let him catch up.

“Had?”

“Hmm?”

“You speak of your husband in the past tense.”

“Oh, yeah. He died a couple of years ago. Heart problems.”

“So your children are alone? Will they survive?” Glath moved back. Perhaps it was coincidence that he shifted to just out of my arms’ reach. Perhaps not.

“No, no, they won’t die. They have other people to look after them. My sister, my parents, Lewis’ parents… humans, um, well it varies depending on culture, but humans tend to have fairly extended family networks for this sort of thing.”

“Like aljik courts?”

“Not… not quite. It’s not about aligning yourself with a Queen and taking on some of her society’s load, it’s more like how people look out for their own. In my society, kids usually raised by one or two parents by default, either their genetic progenitors or other adults who have chosen to take on a child. Some have more parents, if their parents have divorced and remarried, or if there are more than two people in their relationship. If that fails, grandparents and aunts and uncles and stuff step in, and if there’s really nobody else, the state – the, um, well I guess that is like an aljik court – takes care of them. That’s just my society, though. In some societies, grandparents are the primary caregivers, and in others aunts and uncles are considered to just be more parents, and in others where polygamy is normal – where it’s normal to marry more than one person – other people in the parents’ relationship may or may not be considered parents as well. Depending on which society it is.”

“They will survive.”

“Yes.” I rubbed away the tears growing in my eyes. “Anyway. Wanna come watch me make a fool of myself trying to talk to some drakes?

* * *

With Glath’s help, I did find Sulon on the bridge. I stepped out in front of him, where he couldn’t miss me, and with my best drake vocalisation and finger-flicks, said “hello”.

He looked at me a moment, glanced at Glath (who was staying out of the way as I’d asked), and walked around me.

I tapped him behind the wing joint like I’d seen drakes do to get each other’s attention. “Sulon!”

He jumped, not expecting a drake to have snuck up on him, turned to face me, and stared, confused. I touched each of my thumb and index fingers to one of his tails and tried again. “Hello.”

He looked at one of the computer consoles. Looked back at me. Hesitatingly raised his tails.

“Hello,” he said.

I flicked my right index finger in a drake gesture of excitement. I indicated myself with two of my ‘tails’. “Charlie,” I said.

He indicated himself. “Sulon.” His wing angle suggested interest.

I touched some of my stitches and gave the gesture I’d seen drakes give to acknowledge that somebody had done the job they’d given them. It was the closest gesture I knew to ‘thank you’. Sulon responded with a rapid storm of sounds and gestures that I couldn’t hope to follow. I blinked.

“Glath,” I asked, “could you translate that?”

“It… he… is asking if the stitches are working,” Glath said.

“Oh.” I told him, in broken, half-remembered chunks of observed conversation, that all was functioning correctly. He asked about the prosthetic on my right shoulder. I waved it away as a negligible problem, which it wasn’t, but there probably wasn’t much anybody could do about it.

It was, all in all, a pretty fruitful conversation, I thought. I broke off when some of the other drakes, who had gathered around to see what was going on, joined the conversation, and I found the multiple threads impossible to follow. The important thing was that they got the idea. Everyone was on the same page.

Admittedly, that page was written in multiple cyphers that nobody had decoded yet, but that was a task for another day.

Next on my list was Tyzyth, the aljik engineer. I still carried the emerald from Kakrt’s face in my tool belt, hidden in an unused pocket. I wasn’t really sure if I was allowed to have it, like maybe there was some kind of taboo against robbing corpses of their facial jewellery, but it also felt like… well, I’d never gotten to know the engineer, but he was my predecessor, the reason I was here. To do his job. I felt like I needed to hold onto a piece of that, somehow.

Stupid, right? I’d never met him, nobody seemed to think me knowing other engineers was at all important, and I didn’t even want to be aboard the Stardancer. Why was I going out of my way to invent new connections out here? I guess I had to be connected to something – that was human nature, right? That was why I wanted to establish communication with everyone.

After letting Glath polish the basic words I’d picked up from the aljik and ensuring I had my gestures right (the different castes used slightly different body language, and I wanted to make sure mine declared me to be an engineer), we went to find him.

My introduction was simple enough. I showed him my shoulder prosthetic and asked for advice on improving it.

My aljik was, naturally, awful, and we relied on Glath a lot more than I’d like to admit (I never let Glath speak for me, though; he would demonstrate the words, and I would repeat them in a sentence), but Tyzyth turned out to be a remarkably patient person. After observing the roataion of my left shoulder for a bit, he helped me realign the cables to improve the movement of my right. The new positions would take some getting used to, but I could already see how they would improve my range when I learned to use my muscles with them appropriately.

From that day on, communicating with my crew became much easier. The aljik weren’t really teachers by nature, so I had to learn a lot from the ever-accommodating Glath to make myself understood on even the most basic of topics, but the drakes seemed to find the novelty fascinating, and went out of their way to teach me new terms and phrases, often saying something in multiple ways if I didn’t understand. They picked up human body language and tone, in a rough sort of way, and started to see where my ability to use my elbows and fingers to imitate their wings and tails was limited. We developed a pidgin over time.

Kerlin, one of the computer techs, complained that the whole thing was way too hard, and cross-species communication was all very well for humans but drakes shouldn’t be expected to know how to do it. Yarrow, the grumpy filtration expert, told him to suck it up. I brought peace by making a deal with Kerlin: if he learned to talk to me, I’d learn how to use the drake-centric computer terminals, just to prove that anybody could manage through any subject with enough work.

And that was how I got somebody to show me how to control the ship’s systems that I would eventually need for my escape.

It was hard work. The languages, the computers, the systems I was expected to fix as an engineer; I don’t think I’d ever done so much learning in my life, and I was barely competent at any of those things. After a week, I could just about figure out how to open a couple of the menus on the drake terminals, but my eyes couldn’t see some of the light frequencies used in the displays so much of it was still nonsense. I ended up having to learn by rote what to hit and when to get certain results.

That wasn’t going to help me if I actually had to fly the thing.

Tyzyth, although harder to talk to, was more helpful, as I could understand the basic physics behind our duties and actually see most of the things I needed to use. We started working as a pair, like he was used to. Glath found the whole thing fascinating; it took a fairly long, involved discussion to explain to him that me simply making friends and learning skills across the ship was a very different thing to the becoming-by-imitation that ambassador colonies engaged in, and I’m not entirely sure that he believed me. I spent less and less time in my ring, and more time in the aljik and drake rings, talking to my friends. I invited them to mine, but none of them could stand the gravity and air pressure there for very long. I floated the idea of a common room, but with the ring design of the ship, there didn’t seem to be any area to make common than was easier than just visiting each other’s rings when we needed to.

Once I could communicate with the drakes well enough to expand a bit, I started teaching them, as well. I didn’t teach them English. I taught them aljik.

Next to Tyzyth, I’d managed to convince a couple of atil to stop running in terror every time they saw me, and had slowly started to befriend them. Atil had a reputation for being pretty dim, and while this was true by aljik standards, they possessed more of a gift for communication than most aljik, and were able to understand me perfectly well so long as I kept my words and gestures as accurate as possible. My new friends were Lln, who was very shy and quiet but remarkably perceptive about other people, and Nil, who was much easier to read because she simply said whatever she was thinking, tact be damned. I brought them along for the drakes to practice communicating with and watched our pidgin evolve into a strange hybrid language, fuelled mostly by drake hypercompetetiveness as each tried to be the best communicator. I barely had to do anything but try to keep up.

It wasn’t like being with humans. It wasn’t like being home. But it was close enough, for now.


	15. Hold My Beer

The problem with space is that there’s a limited supply of everything.

Not that we’re necessarily short on things. Just limited. Everything has to be recycled – water, air, organics. Recycling efficiency is time; any loss puts a limit on how long before you need to dock with a ship or a port to resupply. We couldn’t afford to resupply often. We had the Faceless Queen gripping our wings so hard it was about ready to rip us through two stages without even seeding a tree. My goal was to find us drakes a nice cushy place to leave the Stardancer before said Queen cut our journey unfortunately short in her little power spat with its sister, and that meant efficiency. In everything.

So, naturally, I was annoyed to learn that an entire water tank had been contaminated by some random microbial colonisation. I froze and boiled it, of course – should be standard procedure for every cycle of the water, but the oh-so-clever aljik engineers had cut it from said procedure to decrease the amount of heat buildup in the ship – to kill them, which seemed to work, but the contamination had been caught late in the cycle. And they’d had time to turn all those tasty little organic additives in the water (what’s that, the water should be completely pure in storage to prevent exactly this kind of spoilage problem? Take it up with our lovely heat-dispersal-obsessed engineers. Oh, you can’t, because one of them was stupid enough to get itself crushed to death in a rotary arm and the other spends all its time these days discussing garbage with that random human we brought aboard against all common sense. You know, the one who recently insisted we start releasing our targets alive. Which means that we can’t superheat and eject their craft post-scavenge, which you might recognise as being I: fatal to the targets we’re supposed to release alive now for some reason and II: a major method of heat dispersal in space. You know. The problem we were trying to minimise by gutting our water filtration procedures. But what do I know? I’m just the filter guy)… where was I?

The water, right. The water that no longer contains living microbes or the harmless trace organics that the mechanical filters left in the water. It now contained dead microbes and their metabolites. These things happen in space sometimes. Whether it’s a problem is really the luck of the draw; specifically, what the particular microbes you got were. The dead microbes themselves were easy to remove; compared to the filters, they were massive, the water could just be poured straight in with them. The water was sterile when we took off and most things that are going to survive in spaceship conditions long enough to infect our supplies would still be cell-shaped after the boiling, so their internals weren’t going to be in the water in high enough concentrations to matter. Besides, the inside of most cells is pretty similar; you get variably-charged long proteins and some kind of alternating-hydrophiliac component for the walls (which normally clump together even if the cell is destroyed, so no problem there), and the petty details were for the biologists to worry about.

The problem was the metabolites. There are a lot of chemicals that the water and air filters on the Stardancer, it being a ship specifically designed to cater to all kinds of different species at once, can deal with. There are a few that they cannot, for boring chemical reasons. There are a rare few that will actively destroy important filters if you pour them through, and while we had spare filters, we didn’t have unlimited spare filters. Everything in space is, as I said, limited.

Of course, we got the filter-destroying kind in this particular batch. I ran the numbers. We have one quarter of our water reserves infected; not dangerous, but it was a big chunk of our emergency supply which was a huge cost in – you guessed it – time that we could spend in space. We could recover about ten per cent with clever filter arrangement if we were willing to sacrifice our entire supply of oxygen-nitrodifferenial filters; definitely not worth it. We could distil it out if we temporarily cannibalised some of the water filtration system in use and put the ship on reserve water, but the amount of heat that would produce would cause a far bigger problem. (Note to self: next time the Princess wants to capture a ship that’s made entirely of moving parts, just leave for the nearest breathable planet. It’s a more dignified way to die stupidly.) Basically, the most efficient thing to do was dump the water. A quarter of our reserve. Because of some stupid microbial contamination.

Hey, at least we could use it to dump a whole lot of heat into space. Great.

So I wasn’t in the greatest mood, all round, when Kerlin showed up in my little grove to ask me if I wanted to go talk to the human.

“It’s learning a lot of new words now, and it wants to know how the ship works,” he said.

“Good. It’s an engineer. Why does it want to talk to me?”

“It didn’t really ask for you,” Kerlin said, flicking his wings (wings that were clean of moulting skin, I noticed, automatically glancing down at his belly… was he changing stages out here?), “it’s been asking everyone about everything. But none of us know how the water filters work, so...”

“So you should leave me to do it?” I asked. “Fantastic idea.”

“Yarrow.”

“What?”

“You really need to interact more.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, we are trapped on a metal box in space. I would like to get off the metal box in space with the smallest amount of aljik nonsense possible. I don’t have time to interact.”

“Really? What are you doing right now that can’t wait?”

I lifted my wings to say ‘trying to figure out how to save us several crestings’ worth of water’, but that was wrong. What I was actually going to do was calculate just how many crestings’ worth of water we’d be dumping (a pretty useless calculation), and then sulk by myself.

“Fine,” I said instead. “If you all really miss me that much.”

“We’re helpless and despondent without you,” Kerlin said tonelessly as we headed out into the rest of the ring.

There were three aljik in the drake ring. This surprised me. They weren’t forbidden from the ring or anything, but visits were rare; there was nothing for them here unless they wanted to talk to a specialist. Instead, somebody had rearranged the wall tarps – rearranged the wall tarps! – to form an open space big enough for a lot of people to sit, and they were. Half a dozen of my drake were there, as well as the three aljik – the living engineer, one of the little while servants, and Ceramic, who still hadn’t figured out how to simulate the pale blue colour of the dohl he was supposed to be. I didn’t know how old Ceramic was or how long it took ambassadors to learn to simulate colours with their tiny wings, but he had sound down; could it really be much harder?

The aljik and human were talking in a confusing mess of gestures and grunts that were sort-of recogniseable as actual words, in stark contrast to the fluency of their drake counterparts. But I could help but notice that the drakes were speaking strangely, too. Their sounds were flattened, their gestures exaggerated. They spoke as if they were just hatched, except with real wings and jaws, of course.

I had seen enough of this nonsense to be able to interpret some of the human’s expressions. When it looked at me and bared its teeth, I checked the eye squint. It was a welcoming gesture.

“Filter guy!” Charlie called with clumsy fingers.

“My name is Yarrow,” I said wearily.

“Yarrow. Thanks so much for the new food. The foot <untranslateable pidgin> made me want to <untranslateable pidgin> with my own toe claws, except <something about rock formations that was probably misgestured>.”

“Not a problem,” I said.

“The new stuff tastes like embryonic plant skin. Way better.”

Probably a mistranslation. I pretended to understand. “Not a problem.” Charlie turned to talk to somebody else, and I took the opportunity to examine it. It seemed not only alive for now, but looked like it would continue to be so indefinitely. Perhaps there was something to this insane policy of sewing flesh together like tapestries. It hadn’t made much sense to me when Sulon had explained it, but everything looked to be working fine. Of course, the human wore its space skin everywhere, so I couldn’t actually see the injuries. I did know, from my extensive research to make sure that the human’s waste wouldn’t destroy our filters or poison everyone unexpectedly (or that the food we developed wouldn’t kill it, but that was a lesser concern), that its chemical biology was fairly similar to drake biology, and it had clearly reacted (however temporarily) to our venom, so there was reason to suspect that things that worked on it would also work on us. Possibly. I didn’t know how anything on a chemical level related to muscle healing.

Also it wasn’t nearly as dead as a drake would be, so that might not be entirely accurate. I was pulled out of my reflection by a question from Taksin, an old friend. “So what’s got you all grumpy.”

“Work,” was all I said.

“Are we all going to die?”

“No.”

Charlie caught the exchange. “What happened?”

“Contamination.”

Charlie gave a gesture I didn’t recognise.

“She doesn’t know the word,” Taksin said. “She wants you to clarify.”

I did. “Bad things in water. Oh no!” I said.

Charlie squeezed its eyebrows closer together. “What <poor attempt at pronouncing ‘contamination’>?”

“Small lifeform. Make bad thing! Hurt water.”

One of the many hideous morphological details of humans (or at least the one single human I’d had to study) is that their oral lips are so taut that part of the inside of their mouth actually rolls to the outside, forming an unsightly fleshy pink ring around their mouth. Charlie pressed these rolls between its teeth, making its mouth look normal for a moment, before continuing slowly and carefully. “Clarify. What bad thing is made?”

“Bad poison. Hurt filter!” I said. “So sad,” I added helpfully, carefully exaggerating every gesture. “Naughty small lifeform!”

Hey, it was research. If Charlie was hanging around, I would probably need to know what humans looked like when they were really annoyed.

Charlie mumbled something in its own language to Ceramic, then pulled its foldable computer from a pouch on its back. It tapped at the primitive physical interface for a little while, then faced the output to me. It was the charge-based chemical array table it had shown me when we first met.

“Clarify,” Charlie said, pointing at the table.

Now the engineer was just being difficult. The air around us was taut with the barely-contained amusement of everyone else in the group. I probably deserved this – I had pushed the baby-talk a little far – but I wasn’t to be outdone. I knew filter chemistry and Charlie didn’t. I dipped a tailspur into the pigment pouch I carried under my right wing and marked the electrochemical array of the molecule onto the floor, using the notation of the chart.

Charlie looked at it. Looked back at me. Looked at it.

“This <untranslateable pidgin> is what’s <untranslateable> your filters?”

“This is the problem molecule,” I agreed. Then, because I couldn’t help myself, I simplified. “This is bad poison, hurt filter and water.”

Charlie stared some more. It pointed to one of the symbols in the array. “Two of these? Not three? Not one?”

“Those permutations are also present, but in negligible amounts. This is the major – ”

“Clarify,” Charlie cut me off impatiently.

“Mostly two. One and three are very rare.”

“How rare? Numbers.”

“We don’t have a system to communicate – ”

“Small numbers in big numbers! Part!”

Fractions, Charlie wanted fractions. “Chain of one, around one in one thousand molecules. Chain of two, around one in twenty. Chain of three, around one in one thousand. Chain of four, around one in one hundred thousand.”

“Fuck,” Charlie said in human. This was one of the few human words that even I knew. It succinctly expressed a common emotion that had never seemed to need a name before I ended up on the Rogue Princess’ ship, but these days I wanted to find a way to express at least once every cresting. “Fuck,” Charlie said again. I agreed, but thought the human was taking the whole thing a little bit too seriously – we had other reserves. I tried to reassure it of this, but it was waving me away and sitting on the floor. It put the computer in its lap and started to work.

It sat there for quite a while, asked a couple of questions about other chemicals hastily drawn on the floor (none of them were present), and then stood up.

“Fuck it,” it said. “Fuck it up the arse with a big knobbly stick until it coughs splinters.” Charlie pressed its fingers to the sides of its head, took a deep breath, and then said in drake, “I can fix your contamination problem.”

* * *

Apparently, a fairly large chunk of our water reserves were contaminated with a dangerously reactive, filter-destroying chemical. It wasn’t a potentially fatal problem, but it was enough to be a serious bummer and there wasn’t much to be done but dump the water, unless some fancy high-tech filter could be wizarded out of nothing.

Well, I am a master engineer apparently, and I had a lot of familiarity with this particular chemical. Humans already had filters for it. No problem. It was something that humans had discovered the toxicity of aeons ago and used it as a sterilising and preserving agent in all sorts of materials since before agriculture (and then a lot more after agriculture, when disease became much more of a problem). It was something that almost every culture used to some degree, but my ancestors, the Europeans, had really gone to fucking town on it, using it to routinely sterilise water in some parts of history because nobody really understood exactly why drinking poop water killed people but they sure figured out that this poison fixed it. The poison being, as discussed, difficult to remove from water without boiling it (and if you’re going to do that why put anything in), it was drunk too, on the logic that it was a lot more poisonous to disease than to us. Which meant that my ancestors developed ridiculously robust systems for detoxifying said chemical in their bodies. Systems that had been passed down to me.

The chemical was, of course, ethanol, in this case in a five per cent concentration with traces of more toxic alcohols present. The filter I intended to use was, of course, me. I could turn that ethanol into all the harmless other chemicals that were already in my piss, that the filters could deal with just fine.

I was gonna get smashed in the name of water preservation. I’ve used worse excuses.

The amount of alcohol present was pretty insane, but this wasn’t water we actually needed right now, so I wasn’t on a time limit for detoxifying it. I could take my time. I’d have to take my time, because the nearest ER was light years away. I worked in my ring; if I was fucking with my blood chemistry I was dealing with it in my native air pressure. I took some water, diluted it to about two per cent alcohol (I’m no lightweight usually but this was a safety-first kind of circumstance and I was going to be doing it a lot), and took an experimental sip. Gross. I dissolved some of my sugar into it, and after some thought, some of the delightful new fruit leather stuff that Yarrow had whipped up for me. It dissolved with concerning ease. I hoped the alcohol didn’t mess with it or something.

Eh, I was pretty sure the body already had alcohol in it. If it was a problem in the drink it was probably poison anyway.

I looked at my handiwork. I’d used fancy scifi space ingredients to make the universe’s shittiest knockoff alcopop. I’m actually more of a beer kind of person, but I didn’t see myself quite managing to replicate the taste of hops with foot jerky. Sugar was easy. And humans can get down pretty much anything with sugar in it.

Time to get fucking wasted.

You know. Carefully.

* * *

Time had been moving quietly. We found and boarded another ship, and Charlie didn’t feel the need to get involved and nearly die. She threw herself into her language experiments until she needed me to translate less and less. This was great news; I had other duties to perform and having to act as translator for a lone member of a species on the ship was a serious drain on my time.

But it seemed that I had less and less of my other duties, too. Several members of the ship had adopted the altered version of the drake language to speak across species barriers, and it was beginning to pick up smatterings of other languages; anything that was easiest for everybody involved to pronounce was incorporated. I still had my duties as a dohl, but they seemed routine and boring and it was difficult for me to care. Strange, that – I’d been so annoyed about being singles out by the Princess and turned into her translator, but now that I was getting more of what I’d always wanted, I just felt lost. I observed as many interspecies conversations as I could, of course; I had to keep up with the language. I’d been blessed enough to see a lot of new things in my life, but they rarely changed so fast. This was more a technology than anything I was used to. I didn’t really do technology.

Somehow, it felt like a bad idea. I didn’t like this change, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. I learned the gestures with aljik arms, with drake tails, with human hands, but the language changed daily. I trusted Charlie, but I was starting to revert to my old opinion that we never should have brought her aboard.

I discussed the issue with Kit. He was a good template, when it came to explaining complex feelings and behaviours. He waved my concerns aside.

“That’s hekln,” he said. “Ignore it.”

“You think Charlie is safe.”

“Oh no, that human is dangerous and is going to doom us all. But your specific feeling here is off.”

“Hekln,” I said slowly. “You think I harbour resentment towards Charlie because I suspect that she is a threat to my favoured status with the Queen?”

“Well, Princess, in our case,” Kit said. “Being a translator has always given you somewhat of a… unique advantage as her dohl, has it not?”

“Charlie isn’t a dohl,” I pointed out.

“But it seems like it is becoming a translator. Or at least removing some of the need for one. I wouldn’t worry about it, though. I’ve been talking to drakes and ketestri all day and there’s no way this can do anything except make your job a bit easier.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” I said. “I’m the least favoured of the three dohl on this ship. No, don’t be like that; you know it’s true. If I’m that fragile, why have I never resented either of you?”

“Last straw? I mean, we’ve never been a threat to you, really.”

“Nobody’s a threat to any dohl on this ship. She doesn’t have enough of us to let us be disposable.”

“Exactly. So if you’re gonna be all on-the-edge over Charlie, it should be because it’s an unpredictable monster likely to kill us at any moment, not because it’s chatty.”

I thanked Kit and left. Talking further would have just made me more confused.

I didn’t think Kit was necessarily correct. Hekln was a pretty common emotion among dohl and we needed to learn to handle it pretty well to be able to form stable friendships, but it had never been too much of a problem for me; probably because I based myself on Kit, and he was always so charming with the Princesses. He never felt threatened. I knew I should spread my template sampling around a bit more, but there were limited options on the Stardancer. Still. The truth was…

The truth was, I hadn’t considered the opinion of the Princess at all. I had no idea how she felt about this development, or if she’d even noticed. I’d long since stopped wondering what she thought of me. How could I feel threatened if my place on the ship was secure? How could I feel deposed if I didn’t care about the Princess’ favour?

I had the human translator. I scoured it for a term to encompass what I was feeling. It wasn’t easy. The translator is designed to work the opposite way; you give it a human word, it tells you what it means. You can reverse-reference, but you can’t look for something specific that way. I also wasn’t entirely familiar with the language of human emotions, so if I did find a related word, it wasn’t easy for me to understand the translation.

Eventually, I found one that seemed, if not exact, a reasonable approximation. It was like hekln, sort of, but applicable to a much wider range of situation. Jealousy.

Was I jealous? Why? How? I moved into a human shape (I was getting really good at the hands after so much language practice) and tried to fit myself into the situation like a human, tried to make sense of their terms and the snippets I knew of their culture.

Nope. Still confused.

A couple of days later, I had a new duty. It was, of course, related to Charlie, who had declared her intention to help Yarrow with a water filtration problem by, as I understood it, systematically poisoning herself so that her body’s defence system would destroy a filter-dangerous substance. I had no idea whether this was normal for humans, drakes, or water filtration practices. Nobody seemed that worried about it, so I decided not to be either.

My job was simple. I was qualified for it for two reasons: I was more comfortable than the rest of the crew in Charlie’s ring, and I had read human first aid manuals in her computer.

My job was to hang around and make sure Charlie didn’t accidentally poison herself to dangerous levels. If she did, I had to move her so that she would keep breathing until her body dealt with the poison. I had been amazed at her recovery from drake toxin, but Charlie was acting as if removing massive amounts of poison from the body was just a thing that humans had to do every so often.

“This is actually pretty safe,” she assured me as she dissolved sugar into contaminated water and sketched a diagram for a ‘paper umbrella’ for Sulon. “I’ve never been blackout drunk in my life. It’s just that I don’t always trust my own calculations, and better safe than sorry, right?”

I agreed that it was better to be safe than sorry, although I had a feeling that Charlie was about to be both.

“Told you,” Charlie said, “we need a pub. Well, for now, this ring is my pub. It’s called Charlie’s. No; no, it’s called… Lewis’ Pride. Yeah. Wait, Lewis hated getting drunk. Fuck.” She sipped at the liquid in her hand and screwed up her face. “Starpantser. That’s it’s name, because I don’t give a fuck any more.”

I waited patiently in the Starpantser Ring while Charlie slowly drank more of the poison. I took over manufacturing it for her, at which point she insisted on calling me ‘barkeep’ and made several references to cleaning a glass with a rag. We had neither glasses nor rags.

“I’m no cheap date, it’s not in my jeans,” she said while patting at her space suit after ingesting a level of alcohol that my rough calculations showed would have destroyed more than half of my colony. She giggled. “Cheap date. It’s a funny genetics story, see? What they did is they took fruit flies and… ugh, I can’t tell it right. Ask Kate about it.” She took another swallow of the drink and screwed up her face. “This tastes like the Candyman’s arse.”

Sometime later, she added, “Unicorn Piss. That’s what I’m calling the chief drink sold at the Starpantser. It’s gonna have this exact recipe and I’m gonna sell it to college girls and make fucking millions.” She drank some more. “Australian millions, you know, not an illegal bag of American money.”

“Where are you going to find these college girls?” I asked, trying to maintain a conversation while I translated. It was easier to monitor Charlie’s condition while she was talking.

“You know, back on Earth. When I get home.” She stared upward at the star pattern she’d programmed to shine in her ring for nine hours out of every twenty five. “You can come visit. Be the amazing spider man. Ha!” This she found hilarious, for some reason. “Spider-Man. Well, spider bug. Spider bug, spider bug, spiders all make up his mug...”

One drink later, she slammed the empty drinking vessel (a small watertight container she had salvaged from storage shortly after joining the crew) down on the crate that she was using to prop her elbows up. “Fuck it, I’m done. I’m gonna be so hung over tomorrow. This was a fucking stupid idea. Why didn’t you stop me.”

The tone didn’t suggest a question, but I answered it anyway. “I was against this plan. You were very emphatic that there was no need for concern.”

“You should know better than to listen to me by now.” She lay back onto the floor. “Ugh.”

“Don’t lie on your back.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“I’m a colony of very tiny parts. Do you think I want to have to roll your heavy arse over if you pass out on your back? In this gravity?”

Charlie snorted. “Lazy bum.” But she rolled onto her side. “I’m not gonna pass out, I’m actually fine.”

“You behaviour is somewhat erratic.” I thought about this. “In ways inconsistent with your normal erratic behaviour,” I clarified. “Even when you were poisoned by drakes.”

“I feel not awesome, but not that not awesome,” she told the floor, leaving me to untangle the negatives. “I refuse to puke in here. Spaceship air is the worst at smells.”

“Actually the filters and air volume on this particular ship make that far less of a problem than on most ships,” I told her.

“Ugh, I hate spaceships. Why is anyone on these things by choice.” She pointed at me, or at least tried to. “You. Why the fuck are you here? You could’ve gone anywhere, set up on a nice cushy planet, just you and Kit and a nice quiet Queen somewhere.”

“Kit wanted to be here.”

“And you followed him, because you two have some kind of soul mate thing going on.”

I translated this. “I am not romantically involved with Kit,” I said. “Aljik bonding structure is not oriented in that – ”

“I meant, like,” Charlie said, waving a hand to silence me, “like, you told me that most ambassadors, they try to be an example of a thing, but not the thing. Right.” She blinked slowly.

“I don’t understand.”

“Like, say you wanna be a drake. So you follow drake around and see what they do. You imitate them. You get a nice big sample. But Kit’s your only template, right?”

“I watch other dohl. It is not unusual to form favourites.”

“How many dohl are on this ship except for Kit and you, again?”

“… one.”

“Yeah, you followed him out here, away from the dohl you needed, to follow a Princess you don’t like doing a job you hate for people who don’t appreciate you. So you could be with him, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I see what you mean.”

No. I didn’t see what she meant. It hadn’t just been Kit, in the beginning. I’d had my pick of templates before the Faceless Queen took over, but I’d followed him to the Princess and lost touch with them. I hadn’t tried to persuade him otherwise. Thinking back, Kit had become particularly special in our isolation; he’d always been a good friend, but I’d had other good friends. Other good templates, back in the good days.

Why had I come out here? If not my Princess or my Template… what had I been following?

Charlie was quiet. I moved forward to check her vital signs. I could have simply swarmed her, but experience had told me that Charlie did not like being suddenly swarmed with ‘tiny creepy fucking flying spiders’, so instead I moved into my now-practiced human shape and checked her breath and pulse with one hand. She was asleep. I fished a blanket from her makeshift metal shelter to insulate her from the floor and air, lifted her onto it (I hadn’t told Charlie, but mimicking human bone and muscle movement actually gave me quite a bit of strength) and moved her into the recovery position. Then I waited. I could probably have left her alone, but I had nothing else to do right then, and I didn’t really want to talk to anyone. I borrowed her computer to read more human texts.

Some of the crew had been abducted, or had been aboard the prison ship when it was liberated and had elected to stay. The drakes had their own specific mission and deal with the captain. The aljik had followed their chosen Princess out here through an absurd legal loophole as part of a political fight that I cared less and less about every day – or perhaps realised more that I’d never really cared. The Princess herself was out here for obvious reasons.

So why was I here?


	16. Blatant Disrespect for the Electromagnetic Spectrum

Ugh. The last time I was this hungover I woke up without eyebrows. I fucked up the calculations somewhere. Or just drank way more than I thought.

Since it was simple arithmetic and I was supposed to be keeping a spaceship running, I really hoped it was the latter possibility. Next time, chase drinks with clean water. Guh.

I opened my eyes. It was pleasantly dark. Somebody had disabled my timed lighting system and turned the lights down very low, to the point where I could barely make out the edges of things. Glath, I presumed. He’d also wrapped me in a blanket and left a bucket of liquid by my head. I tasted it – clean water. Good. I dunked a fallen cup into it and drank.

I still had my panadol. Tempting. So fucking tempting. But knowing my luck, I’d take the last of them for some simple pain and then immediately need them as a blood thinner or something. Instead, I lay back and tried to go to sleep again, which was of course impossible. Eventually, when my bladder felt like it would burst, I had to find my way to the bathroom, but I didn’t let that defeat me – oh, no. It was right back to my blanket after that.

It wasn’t until after I laid down that I realised I could’ve just as easily gotten into my nice, comfy car. Too late now.

Fuck. Why did I do shit like this. Why was I trying to impress space lizards with my amazing liver. I was too old for this shit.

* * *

“The engineer is definitely not dead, Ceramic?”

“She’s recovering. This is normal. I think.”

Yarrow tried to hide the tremble of concern in his wings. “It ingested a lot of toxins.”

“She has a tolerance for them, apparently. She just needs time.”

“If it dies, the Princess – ”

“She will not die.”

“How sure can you be?”

“… fifty per cent?”

* * *

Foot jerky helped. It had substance. I resisted the urge to head out of the ring as soon as I was mobile – I wasn’t fucking with my air pressure and gravity until I was one hundred per cent. I couldn’t focus enough to study, though, which left me little to do. Why couldn’t I have pirated a shitload of TV on my laptop or something?

Why was I even engaging in this pointless nonsense? Just dump the contaminated water, why did I care? Because I wanted to show up a random drake who’d tried to make me look like an idiot, that was why. God. I had a mission to focus on. I had shit to do. I had to get home.

I didn’t have time for this shit.

When I felt up to leaving my ring, I went to the shaft, thought a bit, and forced myself to stay put for another hour. Only then did I go looking for Tyzyth so we could coordinate our engineering schedules. Engineering was so much easier with a partner.

I ran into Kerlin on the way. He seemed very concerned about me.

“It was just a hangover,” I told him dismissively. “I had way worse in my teen years.” We didn’t have a word for ‘hangover’; I don’t think my substitute composite word ‘poisonpain’ made him feel much better. I told him I’d see him for my computer system lessons later and asked him to tell Yarrow to hold onto the contaminated water for a bit while I got some very important engineering out of the way. (This was a lie, but I’d long learned that very few people on the ship had any more understanding of my job than I did of theirs. If I said I was fixing something, I could do whatever the fuck I wanted and very few people would question it.) What I actually had to get done, aside from learning more about the ship’s navigational systems, was check out one of the escape pods.

I was going to need to learn how to pilot one of those eventually. Might as well start making a plan for that now. When I figured out how to get to Earth, I wanted to have a full idea of what to do and what problems still needed solving. I’d need food, fuel, a way to sneak through the cordon… might as well get trivial shit like ‘how do I actually use a spacecraft’ out of the way early.

I found Tyzyth. He wanted to do a manual check of the ship’s external systems. Most of the systems couldn’t be monitored from inside, because the ship we were travelling in was more a discount convict bucket than a real ship, so this was something we’d started doing every four days or so. It was boring and we’d found exactly zero problems doing it so far, but I didn’t complain. For one thing, better safe than suddenly hurled off into space because of a weak ring axle or something. For another, I was learning a lot about the ship. I didn’t understand electronics or heat dissipation or charge-based water separation, but boy did I know what kinds of hoses they used and where those hoses went.

So, y’know, when something broke in my little escape craft on the home journey, I could make sure it looked right before I died of a more specialised mechanical problem.

I was beginning to think Project: Escape Space Pirate Ship of the Exiled Bitch Princess was going to be kind of complicated.

We didn’t find anything wrong with the ship on our external inspection. I paid extra attention to the mechanisms holding the escape pods in place and asked Tyzyth a bit later to explain how the escape pods pressurised and disengaged and how long it took. He told me. He just straight-up told me, step by step, the detachment sequence, how it was initiated, and which mechanisms were most likely to fail.

It takes a little over two minutes to launch an escape pod. They’re better launched with precalculated destinations (sent by the bridge computers), but they have backup manual controls inside the pods, too. By the time he’d finished explaining this, it was time for me to go and learn more about how said bridge computers worked. Which was still impossible, because no matter how much I learned, I could still only see half of the screen colours with my poor human eyes. Everyone was unbelievably helpful when you just learned how to talk to them. So I plucked up my courage and asked.

“How do you see where in space we are?” I asked casually.

And Kerlin pulled up a star map. Just like that.

I tried to look more vaguely curious than excited as I pulled my phone out to take a picture. I took pictures of anything I needed to repair, for reference, as well as anything that looked interesting, so this wasn’t met with any surprise or suspicion. God, no wonder a bunch of random abductees had managed to best these guys. I wondered if the Jupiterians had been like this. For people who had been so suspicious and scared a few weeks ago, now they were so blasé about me just striding through whatever I wanted and getting whatever information I liked. Weren’t we in the middle of some kind of aljik succession war? Shouldn’t they be worried about spies and shit? I guess they knew that I, a recently abducted human, couldn’t be a spy, and I doubted that anyone on the ship could secretly converse outside it so it hardly mattered, but still. Standards.

Anyway, my phone picked up the displays worse than my eyes did, but it was something. A grid of stars that marked our location and a couple of landmarks. Spacemarks. Whatever. (They turned out to be a known repair port and a known patrolled military zone, if you’re curious, neither of which were close enough to be a problem for us.) Now, I just needed to know where Earth was in relation to this map, and…

Well, then I had to figure out how to steer a ship there, which was going to be a problem still, but one problem at a time.

It was all going really well, actually. Things were moving forward.

Until the military attacked.

* * *

I hadn’t been sure how to feel, at first, about the Princess taking on an unpredictable member of a quarantined planet known specifically for its damage to our Empire. Well, that’s a lie. I had known how to feel. I was against it. They were replacing my friend, my dear partner for so many years, now tragically lost… with a pre-spaceflight violent monster?

There hadn’t been any choice. I’d known that. The dash shielding was damaged and we had perhaps two dashes in it before it tore the ship apart, and we had to use one of those dashes just to get away from Earth. And I hadn’t even known about Kakrt’s body jamming the rotary arm. (I didn’t inform the Princess of just how close we all came to dying there. There was no need – the problem was solved before I found out. But it certainly didn’t help convince me that treating an outdated prison station like an actual spaceship was particularly safe.)

But since Charlie had sought me out, I’d come around. It was kind of like working with Kakrt again.

“Hey,” Charlie signed to me in the sign language we used for external repairs, “if we stuck these rods to the ends of the ship’s stabilising poles and packed them with deox combuster, we could turn the ship into a giant wheel of fire.”

Well. Not quite like working with Kakrt.

“Do not set the ship on fire,” I said patiently. “Combustible fuels are valuable emergency supplies.”

Charlie dismissed this with a flick of the fingers. “Hold them down so I can tape them in place, then.”

I did. We taped them in place. We were working in the last one when Charlie froze, and pointed out into space. “What’s that?”

I looked. Humans don’t have great senses, but they have better long-distance vision than aljik. I saw nothing against the canopy of stars, and said so.

“It’s moving weird. Standby.” Charlie pulled its ‘phone’ from its toolbelt (safely tethered to the belt in case it was dropped, of course), and a lens about the width of a human hand from another. I’d seen Charlie use these cannibalised camera lenses to get a better look at things we were working on in the past; I’d helped put together the magnification distances. Charlie secured the lens to the socket glued around the phone camera, clumsily tapped at the phone screen with suited fingers, and pointed. After a moment, it stopped to add a second lens.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said. “Can we get this done?”

Charlie aimed the phone again. “There.”

I looked. The distance was far too great for something held in human hands to train on it properly, especially since we were on a moving surface, but between the both of us we managed to sight it long enough to identify it. Or identify two things about it – it was a spaceship or artificial satellite of some kind, and it was pointed at us.

“Inside,” I said. “Now.”

We headed for the airlock.

Alarms were already blaring inside the ship, of course. We didn’t even bother de-suiting, but headed straight for the control ring.

“We need to put some radios in here,” Charlie signed as we pulled ourselves down the central axle. “This is ridiculous. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to talk to each other over radio. It’s demonstrating a blatant disrespect of the whole electromagnetic spectrum.”

One downside to learning drake was that Charlie had incorporated a lot of their gesture-only terms into engineer sign language, allowing these sorts of nonsense rants all the marshglittering time. There wasn’t much that I could do about it. In pure engineer’s sign, there’s no way that anybody could have expressed the concept of ‘blatant disrespect of the whole electromagnetic spectrum’.

I pulled off my helmet in the control ring shaft. Charlie didn’t, having taken to spending as little time in non-human air pressure conditions as possible.

“Military,” I was told as soon as the door to the control ring opened. “The captain’s attempting evasion, soldiers are getting ready to face the boarding party.” I acknowledged this order and got out of the way of assembling combatants.

Drakes tapped at their control panels. The captain lay wired into the central control system, looking just as if she were peacefully sleeping. The combatants were mostly in place, waiting, and my job was to get out of the way of anywhere that there was likely to be fighting if we were boarded.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” I signed to the still-helmeted Charlie, who acknowledged this with a ‘promise’ signal. Behind us, drakes were going through their pre-combat checks, and for the first time, I could understand most of what they were saying. They checked that our systems were ready for blue dash, green dash, inertial control was balanced… and a little voice ran through the back of my mind; was the engineering up to it? Were our blue and green dash shields in good repair? (Not that there was much you could do to shield a green dash, necessarily, but you could at least avoid liquefying the crew’s organs with the acceleration if you were lucky and smart.) Were our inertial control arms properly responsive? Of course. We checked them every few days. It’d be fine, right? Everything was in working order.

I headed for the aljik environmental ring and waited for the combat to be either avoided or over. My part was done.

The ship was as functional as it was going to get.

* * *

The thought that was occupying my minds as I careened through space away from our beautiful craft was ‘I spent so much time repairing bits of that fucking thing and you had to cut it in half. This is why we can’t have nice things.’

The Stardancer wasn’t ‘nice’, perhaps, but it was the first spaceship I’d ever been on, however unwillingly. Also I was about to die in the vacuum of space. So give me a break.

At least I wouldn’t have to explain to Tyzyth that I really hadn’t done anything stupid. This situation was entirely out of my control; I was the victim of misinformation. Nobody had informed me of some pretty key facts of our current encounter with the space cops.

Key fact 1: apparently the lovely Queen’s military were done fucking around with clamps and neat arrests and had escalated to ‘just kill them all in space by straight-up cutting their fucking ship in half’.

Key fact 2: said military did, in fact, have weapons capable of just straight-up cutting our fucking ship in half.

Key fact 3: if you are merrily making your way along a zero-gravity corridor down the centre of your ship, harmlessly heading from a crowded bridge to you nice and peaceful human environmental ring to patiently wait out any fighting, and in front of you a huge fucking space laser slices that corridor open and exposes it to the vacuum of space, the significant air pressure of the corridor and the void outside will, naturally, equalise, making you immediately regret every comment you ever made about the air pressure in said central corridor being too low as it takes you on a merry dance into the void with it.

Well, okay, perhaps I didn’t need to be explicitly told key fact 3, which was a pretty commonly known physical consequence. But key facts 1 and 2 were pretty central for determining key fact 3’s relevance.

Anyway, the point was that I had ended up in fucking space, zooming further away from the Stardancer with every second I spent trying to get my bearings. Aside from a slight spin, I wasn’t accelerating any more, so bearing acquisition wasn’t hard; I identified which half of the Stardancer had the bridge in it, grabbed the nearest piece of junk, and launched it behind me in the opposite direction. There, a little speed. I did it again.

I had a lot of work to do. The thing about moving in space is that, without a ground or wind resistance to orient yourself, there’s not really a concept of ‘moving’ versus ‘not moving’. You’re accelerating or you’re still, with the world moving around you. (I bet my boys would be amazing at this. They love first-person-shooters, the idea of seeing things move while feeling motionless is probably second nature to them.) So what was happening here, from my perspective, was that I'd been happily floating down the corridor before suddenly accelerating at a rate that could not possibly have been good for any of my internal organs and, frankly, I was pretty surprised hadn’t killed me; then, after a second, I wasn’t accelerating any more aside from a (mercifully) slight spin. And now my only method of deceleration was to grab at whatever I could reach, launch it by hand in the opposite direction as hard and as accurately as I could, and thank Newton’s Laws for existing. So that’s what I did. While trying not to spin too fast, which is a lot harder than you’d think. And trying not to think about the fact that I was untethered. Or my injuries, which definitely existed, but that I couldn’t feel. Probably not a good sign.

I was going to have to surpass the speed of the Stardancer, catch it up, then accelerate again to match its velocity when I hit it, hopefully in a controlled manner and not by just colliding with it and bouncing off the side like some fucking idiot who thought it was a good idea to launch themselves at an alien military ship on an improvised tether with practically no spacewalking experience, aha, what kind of absolute moron would do something like that.

Oh yeah, and there was today’s military ship with its Bigarse Fucking Laser still attacking, too. But that was of rather less concern than the fact that I’d run out of stuff to throw. I still hadn’t matched the Stardancer’s velocity, and everything was out of arm’s reach, which meant that it might as well be back home on fucking Earth for all the good it could do me.

Whelp. Goodbye, engineering tools. I’d probably need the contents of my belt if by some miracle the Stardancer survived this attack, but that was a later problem. My ‘right now’ problem was dying in the ruined remnants of the Stardancer instead of the vacuum of space. I picked my heaviest tools first (a task that had to be done from memory, as I was currently without gravity and wasn’t fucking around with inertia tests by feel right then), aimed, and hurled. The belt was half empty before I was confident that I was catching up, albeit very slowly, to the functional half of the Stardancer. I resisted the temptation to speed up. Not only could I not afford to bounce off the ship without a tether, I might need my remaining tools for course correction.

A battle was going on this whole time, of course. Aljik combatants from the removed half of the Stardancer had launched themselves from the wreckage; not just dohl and tahl, but all sorts of castes. My guess would be that every aljik sperated from the controlled part of the ship had just gone, “Fuck it, we’re gonna die anyway.” They looked to be wearing space suits, but not complete ones… many of them had uncovered limbs, which… how could that possibly work…? Ugh, that wasn’t my problem right now. The few escape pods on the detached part launched too, their crew heading for the other half of the Stardancer. The military were ignoring the soldiers, but zapping escape pods one by one.

They were after somebody specific. I hoped it wasn’t me.

As the gap between me and the Stardancer closed very, very slowly, I took stock of my physical health as best I could. My suit was maintaining air pressure, so… good, no leaks there. I would’ve liked more air on hand to breathe – I was still on the tank I’d been using for a couple of hours for our inspection and repairs – but I easily had enough so long as nothing else fucked up (I say, in the middle of a space battle). My various internal organs were sending me all kinds of very confusing pain and discomfort signals and I couldn’t tell if I was bleeding anywhere in the suit. At least one rib, probably broken. Legs moved, arms moved… broken finger. It was as I was inspecting my finger that something that had been on the edge of my mind since being launched from the ship came to light; notably, my field of vision was abnormally small. I was blind in my left eye. Not sure how, but it probably wasn’t anything fatal, so it could wait.

I’d lost a bunch of weight healing various injuries aboard the Stardancer, was a mess of scars with a barely functioning right shoulder, had no idea how well my insides were doing after successive experimental foods, poisonings, dramatic air pressure changes, and blunt force traumas, and now I was blind in one eye. Just how much of me would even be left when I got back to Earth?

The battle wasn’t going well. The military ship was covered in badly suited aljik who mostly seemed, somehow, to be alive, but they had no way to get inside. I couldn’t quite make out what they were doing, but they seemed, in desperation, to be copying my stupid stunt – fucking up any surface instruments they could get their spindly insect legs into. What they were mostly doing was being thrown off the ship into space as it executed a series of rolls. As I watched, several of them stopped moving. The giant space squid held on remarkably well, though.

Hang on, did I forget to mention the giant space squid?

‘Squid’ may not have been an accurate description. ‘Living balloon trailing big white tendrils all over the place’ might be more accurate. ‘Giant’, on the other hand, was completely accurate – it was about an eighth the size of an environmental ring, which made it nearly as big as the military ship. It had launched itself from the wreckage shortly after the aljik, grabbed onto the military ship, and was picking up whatever aljik floated away. It didn’t seem to be able to do much damage to the ship by itself, but it was soon armed (hur hur, puns) with a bunch of aljik, who could. The problem was that these aljik seemed to be dying pretty rapidly, as far as I could tell with my limited vision from some distance away. The giant space squid’s reaction to this was to.. eat them? It shoved them in an orifice inside its big silk balloon body, anyway. Gross.

Another problem: while the aljik-and-space-squid attack had managed to distract the military ship long enough to get a few escape pods past, they had done exactly dick to the giant fuckoff space laser. The military aimed this at the chunk of the Stardancer that happened to be closest to their nose when they gave up on trying to throw the space squid off – the half without the bridge – and fired. They carved the laser through several environmental rings. Several still-pressurised environmental rings.

This had about the effect that you might expect. Everything exploded. I saw my car drift past, delicate camera equipment inside crashing and smashing about and occasionally floating through shattered windows. ‘Bye, car.

One outcome was that it left me moving at considerably greater speed towards the other half of the Stardancer, the half I was heading toward. This did cost me a few new bruises and some most spinning, which I counteracted with my marvellous new bounty of fresh debris, but by the time I’d gotten that sorted out, I wasn’t heading for the Stardancer any more.

I mean, I was still heading in the correct direction for the Stardancer. It hadn’t moved. The problem was that something was now in the way. That something was the military ship, which had apparently decided to board the wreck instead of shoot it.

Oh, also, my new speed, while great for cutting down on my drifting-through-space time, had now not only cut into my figure-out-how-to-get-around-the-ship time, but meant that the impact with said ship was going to really fucking hurt. And almost definitely send me bouncing back off into space.

You know what, fuck it. I hate lasers. I hate the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Fuck you, electromagnetism.

* * *

I had been waiting patiently in the aljik ring when everything jerked violently to one side, slamming everybody in the ring heavily against the wall. While some jerking and shifting was common in space combat, this was extreme. It was immediately obvious that something was very wrong. This was underpinned by the warning alarm; air pressure had been lost in the central axle.

“What’s happening?” Gekt asked me, apparently under the impression that as an engineer I must have perfect and mystical insight into the specific condition of the ship at all times.

“Air pressure has been lost in the central axle,” I told her.

“Wow. Thank you for this new information. Never would have figured.” She twitched her massive forelimbs, limbering them for battle. I could see why she was in a bad mood; she’d normally be working with Kit or Ceramic in the control ring, ready to protect the Princess herself. Being posted in the aljik ring was still a pretty honourable position; it was a high-profile area (there were so few combatants on the ship that they could only really be assigned to high-profile areas), but it was a demotion. Probably because she had been the tahl leading the capture of the drake ship that had resulted in letting them board the Stardancer and nearly get Charlie killed. An embarrassing circumstance all round, and somebody had to take the fall. The Princess was hardly going to punish Kit, so I guessed that Gekt must have taken the brunt of it.

Politics weren’t really my problem, though. My problem was figuring out what had just happened. Fortunately, this took very little time to do. Everything had been dramatically moved to the side, and our central axle was vacuumed. Something had breached the central axle and, from the feel of it, cut quite a portion of the ship off.

“I’ll check it out,” I said, putting my helmet back on.

It was far worse than I’d thought. A significant portion of the ship had been removed… and we were in it. The ship had been cut nearly in half.

It could have been worse. The ring that had been in the path of the laser was two rings away from ours. If the laser had been a little further over…

Well, we were dead anyway. There were ways to patch in emergency controls for the engines, so we could pilot our way over to the rest of the Stardancer in time, but time was what we didn’t have. Neither half of the ship had enough dash shielding even for a blue dash, and we were in the middle of battle. Below me, something white drifted and flapped about; it took me a moment to recognise it; it had been a long time since I had had contact with our resident ketestri. The ketestri, being large and fairly docile beings that could survive an amazing range of pressures and atmospheres including, for a limited period of time, open space, were natural polymer factories, and the one on the Stardancer mostly made space suits, meaning I hadn’t really contacted it since I’d been measured for mine. Its ring was next to ours, and apparently the laser had partly breached it. It probably had the best chance of survival of all of us; after we were dead, it would simply pry itself out of the damaged side of the ring and take a gamble on finding a ship or planet before starvation set in. It looked to be trying to pry itself out already.

Strewn between the two halves of the Stardancer was a mess of debris and… I looked closer.

Was that Charlie?

It was! The idiot human was repeating the trick it had tried against the first military vessel! Couldn’t it see that they were aiming to kill this time? Couldn’t it –

I looked at Charlie.

I looked at the ketestri.

I took my cutter from my belt, and started cutting a hole big enough for the ketestri in the side of its ring. We were all going to die anyway, why not take the chance? I didn’t exactly have a shared language with the ketestri, but I knew how to place a material order.

“Space suits,” I told it, “for everyone. As fast as you can.”

* * *

So anyway, I didn’t slam into the military ship and die. I got picked up by a big sticky squid tentacle and eaten.

Technically an improvement on my situation.

The inside of the squid thing was, as I had feared, a big slimy throat. In fact it was more slimy than I thought it was going to be. It was completely full of mucous, which I was dragged through. It was full of several chambers of mucous, of different densities. Powerful muscles squeezed me through. At least I assumed they did. I could see exactly nothing.

Eventually, the resistance stopped; I was no longer being dragged through goo. I was, in fact, in a much larger area, with no muscles pressing against my poor fragile and beaten human body. There was space! And there didn’t seem to be stomach acid! There was, however, a lot of moving things.

My helmet was covered in goop, and there was absolutely no way I was taking it off until I was certain that I was in a breathable atmosphere, which meant that I couldn’t see a damn thing. I couldn’t even tell if there was any light to see by. But I knew the feel, even through my sticky gloves, of aljik chitin; I was surrounded by my fellow crewmates, in various states of animation. At least some of them were definitely alive.

Yay?

So I waited. Like a good little engineer. I wasn’t getting involved in the battle. I was doing as I’d promised Tyzyth. I wasn’t doing anything stupid.

* * *

The space around me was littered with my crewmates, dead and alive. The haphazard suits that the ketestri had churned out were things that I would never, under normal circumstances, have left a spaceship in; it had effectively just glued pressurised membranes over anything delicate and expected them to hold to the chitin well enough. Surprisingly, they seemed to work, and exposing limbs to the vaccuum of space, while being a truly terrible idea, was better than waiting to die inside the wreck of half a ship.

Said half of a ship had been lasered in half a little while ago, vindicating our decision. I’d seen the escape pods launch first and hoped that some of the drakes got out okay. Most of the pods were destroyed.

We’d failed to destroy the laser before it blew up half of our ship, but the ketestri had been involved in the attempt, trying to find a gap of some kind to force some of its extremely fine tendrils (the ones so thin as to be barely visible) into something, anything, and throw it off. Obviously, this was not a likely thing to find in something protected from space, but the laser had fired through the tendrils and baked the ketestri’s tendrils to its surface. The beast’s mucous formed a thick, dark, apparently unremovable crust, and it had started spewing as much of its mucous over the laser as it could, the residual heat baking it on.

Now, a non-engineer might, upon seeing the laser fire and the mucous smoke and nothing come out, say that the mucous could somehow block a laser capable of cutting a spaceship in half. Certain members of our very crew who simply had no patience for the science of heat distribution and kept their interest solely on cruder, more material aspects of physics without any apparent care as to how their pet resource filtration projects might interfere with ship maintenance as a whole might believe some nonsense like this. But of course what is much more likely to have happened was that the cooking mucous generated far too much heat right up against the cap on the laser, cracked it, and let the gaseous lens leak out into space.

That’s my pet theory, anyway. Whatever happened, the laser was broken, and the Stardancer safe from that particular weapon.

So the crew decided simply to board.

There was very little that we could do about this. I was the only aljik out in a real space suit, and most of those in our makeshift ones were now safely inside the ketestri to reduce their chances of dying. We couldn’t seem to get into the military craft or do much damage to it. The spaceship lined its airlock with the vacuumed central axle of the Stardancer and proceeded to initiate sealing and pressurisation procedures, a wide tarp spewing from around their airlock and seeking to adhere to the sides of the corridor. Whatever was about to happen inside the ship, we would be completely locked out.

The ketestri was having none of that. It scooped me up in one tentacle and dropped between the two ships, nudging them apart to make room. I never thought I’d see a living creature nudge a spaceship out of the way, but then I rarely interact with any living creature as big as a spaceship. The ketestri backed as much of its body into the axle as it could, which was unfortunately not even close to the whole thing. Around us, layers of mucous and flesh were scraped away by the raw (and probably still quite hot) sides of the axle. The ketestri’s body acted as a plug.

This did not seem to dissuade the military in any way. They simply released more tarp to adhere and pressurise around the ketestri. In the confined space, it wouldn’t be able to use its tentacles; they would simply cut their way through the beast using small weapons and march on. They had no need to worry about damaging the Stardancer, so they were probably carrying lasers.

I, of course, was still in the grip of the ketestri. Now in the space covered by tarp, that would be full of the Queen’s military the moment the pressure was survivable. Wonderful.

The pressure in our newly formed room increased. I couldn’t feel this, already being in a space suit, but I could see the ketestri slowly pushed further back into the axle corridor, shedding more flesh against the corridor edges, by the increasing pressure differential.

The doors opened. I was faced with a contingent of tahl, each with a laser in her mantibles. I couldn’t see how many there were, because a single tahl takes up pretty much the entire ship entrance.

They could only attack in single file. Hooray.

We were dead. The tahl were going to cut their way through me, and then through the ketestri, and then down into the control ring to kill our Princess. We were completely trapped.

The ketestri lifted me up out of the way, to one side. Maybe I would live after all. I doubted it.

The ketestri opened its mouth.

And vomited an army towards the military ship.

* * *

Things were pretty quiet on Team: Ingested By Space Squid for a little while. And then they were decidedly less quiet as the whole mess of us were violently ejected in a jumble of chitinous limbs and pain. I couldn’t see anything, of course, because of my dumb mucous-covered helmet. Or hear anything. Same reason.

We definitely weren’t safe, though. Some kind of chaos was happening around us, and if I couldn’t get my bearings, I was definitely going to die. No choice. Fuck it. I gripped my breather in my teeth, offered a brief prayer to whatever sadistic force out there found it amusing to keep me alive long enough to put me through more bullshit like this all the time, and took the helmet off.

I didn’t die. There was an atmosphere, about bridge pressure. The return of sight and hearing did not, however, provide as much information on what the fuck was going on as I’d hoped. We were floating in some kind of big tent thing. The space squid was in it. A door of some kind to something else was attached to it. That was about all the information I had.

No: that wasn’t all, There were also several tahl, and I knew that the Stardancer didn’t have that many. These ones were serious-looking and had something I’d never seen before nestled in their mandibles, and they were butchering my crew.

That was the kind of info I needed. Although it was lacking in one important detail. Notably, how the fuck do you even fight a tahl. They’re the space insect equivalent of tanks, and these ones were obviously really good at fighting as a team.

“Hey, Tyzyth!” I called, noticing my teammate kind of hovering on the end of a squid tentacle and holding a cutter in the manner of somebody who had forgotten it was in his claws. “How’s your day going?”

“Could be better,” he said. “Will probably get worse.”

Stardancer aljik took down one of the tahl, dogpiling her and trying to bite her limbs off at the joints. But there were others, and we were all pretty injured. We were an annoyance, delaying them more out of surprise than anything, and it wouldn’t be long before we were dead and they were pressing forward. A couple of them already seemed to be preparing to cut into the space squid with their face weapons. I saw one aim, get bumped slightly by a tussling pair of aljik, and immediately close her mandibles until she was stable again.

She had to take her shot very carefully, I realised. She wanted to his the squid and only the squid; not her teammates, not her ship, and…

Oh. That might work.

“EVERYONE BACK IN THE MOUTH!” I screamed in drake. I couldn’t get the delicate finger-gestures right in my mucous-encased suited gloves, but pointing and screaming seemed to get my message across. Aljik ran for the space squid, who got the idea and started scooping people up and swallowing them again. I snatched the cutter from Tyzyth’s claws; my own had been ballast on my little journey into empty space.

“You should put your helmet back on,” I told him.

That’s when I think he realised what I was going to do. His mandibles flared. “You promised nothing stupid!”

“Sorry.” I put my own helmet on. Not everyone had listened to me about getting swallowed again; several aljik were still fighting desperately. I couldn’t wait for them. Bracing myself, I turned the cutter on.

I moved close to the tarp encasing our delicate little atmosphere. And I started cutting.


	17. Alive, Apparently

I sat in the driver’s seat of my trusty little car, brushing a stray floating camera lens out of the way to get a better look at Kate, who was sulking. Actually sulking, arms crossed, slumped forward, pouting. Everything.

“I’m sorry I got abducted and left you behind to raise a couple of orphans,” I sighed.

“Aliens aren’t your fault,” she mumbled.

“I’m glad we agree then.”

“Know what is your fault, though, dear little sister?” She glared at me. “You went to space – space, with aliens! – and you didn’t bring back any biological data?!”

I blinked.

“You weren’t curious at all? About how suitable the synthetic food was? About your tolerance for pressure changes? Poisons? Did you bring me even a skin slide of a drake or something?”

“Well, no. I didn’t go around harvesting the skin of my friends.”

“Why not?”

“Kate, I… a lot of shit was going on. A was concentrating on getting home, not carefully bottling blood and piss and alien skin fragments for later analysis. How would I even store biological samples?”

“What about your pulse rate and blood pressure? Glath’s clever, I’m sure he could find a way to measure blood pressure. Do you have any idea how valuable that information could have been? Especially with the drake venom.”

“Oh, right, that definitely should’ve been foremost in my mind.”

“Did you photograph your wounds?”

“What?”

“Your wounds. To track their healing. Even photographs would have been invaluable. We could have analysed their colouration and healing rate. Their infection rates.”

“They didn’t get infected. Nothing got infected.”

She smiled, and there was something wrong with her teeth. “I know. Pretty weird, huh?”

“Okay, okay, stop. I knew I’d start dreaming of family eventually, but does it have to be this weird caricature? Can’t I get something closer to my actual loving sister saying goodbye to me while I bleed out? Please?”

“It’s your dream, Charlie. If this is the part of me you get, it says more about you than me.”

“Oh, fuck off,” I said, and woke up.

So I wasn’t dead, apparently. I was in quite a lot of pain. And hungry. And couldn’t move very much. But I wasn’t dead.

Pity.

I was on some kind of squishy white padding on a metal floor. Air pressure, temperature and gravity were all comfortable. Except for a sharp pain in my ribs, I could breathe fine, which surprised the hell out of me. I could see fine through my right eye, although I was getting nothing from my left. So far as I could tell, my hearing and smell were normal, I could speak, and I could move and feel at least one foot, which meant my spine was intact. It was hard to test my touch senses because everything just felt like pain. But pain detection was working fine. Hooray!

I had obviously received medical attention. Something flexible enough not to impede breathing had been strapped over my probably broken ribs. My right leg was encased in a cast from just under the knee to my toe. Two fingers on my left hand were splinted. A couple of cuts had had something stuck over the top to protect them, something that looked a lot like my space suit fabric but thinner. I didn’t find any stitches. A quick inspection with my tongue told me that several teeth were chipped and at least one was cracked in half (an agonising discovery, I don’t recommend it). These hadn’t been treated. Perhaps the most incongruous part of my treatment was the drip in my arm. Here I was on an alien spaceship, and there was a drip in my arm. It wasn’t exactly medical standard, clearly cobbled together out of random tubing and hung on whatever bit of spaceship wreckage happened to be of a convenient shape, but the needle went into my arm and I wasn’t dead. I sighed in relief, which hurt my ribs.

Glath and Tyzyth were alive.

The modified drip had Tyzyth written all over it, and it had to be Glath who had directed the splinting of my injuries and explained what a drip was. He’d been studying my pirated books pretty obsessively, especially anything related to human biology or culture. I was sure the rest of the crew would, given the opportunity, make an effort to keep me in one piece, but I didn’t think they’d use human methods to do it.

My space suit and toolbelt lay next to me. I went through them to see what I still had. Not very much; most of the heavy tools I’d thrown into space. Some of my lighter wirecutters and files and the lightest of my hammers were there. The emerald I’d taken from Kakrt’s body was there. My phone was there, dangling its charger cord – the cord had become part of the phone some time ago, after Tyzyth had expressed concern about what continually exposing it to the vacuum of space might be doing to its electronics. Our answer to the problem had basically been to permanently glue the cord in place so we didn’t need to leave the charging socket exposed and then seal the phone in a bag of some kind of very thin, high-tech plastic that clung tightly to its surface and had a specialised heat dispersal strip down the back. Then we’d gone nuts and glued on sockets for camera arpetures and soforth, because why not. (Side note: vacuum of space also very, very slightly fucks with how lenses work. I was surprised too.)

Anyway, looking at the charging cord reminded me that the charger for my laptop had been in my now-destroyed human ring of the spaceship, along with pretty much all my stuff. Fuck. I was pretty sure – not certain, but pretty sure – that I had left the laptop itself on the bridge at Kerlin’s terminal, after our last little trade-off of computer system and language lessons. But I had no way to charge it.

Now, if I could just focus exclusively on that extremely unimportant little problem, then maybe all of my other, more important problems would solve themselves when I wasn’t looking. Yeah.

Man, if only I had something to deal with the pain. Even just my panadol would be –

In space. My panadol were in space.

Motherfucker. I could’ve taken them for every little twinge I’d had so far and it wouldn’t have made a goddamn bit of difference. I suffered for nothing. Ah, well, they weren’t strong enough to do all that much, especially with this grand little assembly of injuries. All of my organs hurt. All of them.

I was pretty sure my toenails hurt.

I sat up. This produced new pain, but not any alarming or unexpected pain. Only the parts that were supposed to move when sitting up complained. This was probably a good sign. I slowly moved my head and back; I’m not sure exactly how to check for a broken spine, but again, most of the pain seemed to make sense. Besides, if my spine was broken, that probably wasn’t something that any of my crew except possibly Glath would have known to be careful about when getting me inside, so I would probably already be paralysed. In fact, I was pretty sure I remembered most of my injuries from before I was eaten by a giant space squid, except for whatever was wrong with my foot. So I’d probably already done a lot of inadviseable physical activity with most of them.

The pad underneath me moved, and I definitely did not scream like a little girl. I was very calm and methodical as I gracefully moved off it onto the metal floor and gave it a measured look.

It was not a foam pad, but living material. Very familiar living material. I had vague memories of it being wrapped gently around me and even stronger memories of something like it forcing me through a whole bunch of mucous.

I looked up at my newest friend, the giant space squid.

“Hi… there...” I whispered.

Here’s the thing: I knew that this guy meant me no harm. Not only were they clearly a part of the crew, but they’d saved my life specifically at least twice and been perfectly content to chill out with me while I was unconscious. Hell, they’d been cushioning me from the cold floor. But.

But.

Giant space squid are terrifying.

People who have eaten you are also terrifying.

Facing a giant, space squid who has not only eaten you before, but you’ve witnessed wrestling with a military ship like some kind of interstellar kraken? Yeah.

Also, this thing was fucking huge. I already knew it was a, well, giant space squid, but it’s actually kind of hard to estimate size in open space. I had been able to clearly see it compared to the military ship, but as I’ve been exposed to two of those in my life and neither in particularly stress-free circumstances, that image didn’t mean much to me. I knew it couldn’t fit in the ship’s central corridor (how the fuck did they get it into this environmental ring?), but a lot of things couldn’t. But I am very familiar with the size of an environmental ring. I spend most of my time inside them. And I couldn’t see most of this squid because it was squished wall-to-wall. It was fucking enormous.

Tentacles of all different lengths and thicknesses were splayed out across the floor of the ring, like squishy white jungle vines. I couldn’t tell if the squid had eyes, or any kind of face. I did remember where its mouth was, very clearly, but that part of it was currently pressed against the floor, if I was interpreting its body shape correctly. Whatever it was doing, it wasn’t paying a huge amount of attention to me, and the floor was cold and hard. Trying not to freak out, I scootched back and sat on the tentacle that had been cushioning me. It curled around to accommodate the shape of my body comfortably.

Yeah, this was fine. This was totally fine. Haha.

Why had I really wanted to meet all the other crew members again?

An atil came in with a small tub of something and placed it in front of me. “Food for you,” she said shyly. Then, “Are you okay?”

I gave a dismissive gesture at the health question (I didn’t want to lie or worry her, atil can be quite emotionally fragile) and thanked her. I didn’t recognise this particular atil – they’re really hard to tell apart and I only knew a few of them well enough to pick out on sight. She waved shyly and left.

I picked up the tub. Well, bowl. If it had food in it it was officially a bowl for now. These are the sorts of semantic gymnastics that one must play when trapped on a spaceship with no human utensils. There was some kind of amber porridge inside, which was new. I sipped it.

As soon as the porridge hit my tongue, horror welled inside me. I choked and spat it out. Fuck. That was no porridge; there was nothing like a grain in the texture. And I knew that taste. I’d tasted it one, before, very briefly. It was kind of like thousand island dressing.

This was pulverised aljik. What the shit. What the fucking shit.

I forced myself to calm down. To examine the situation logically. There were bound to be a lot of dead aljik bodies around after the fight, both ours and the enemy. And even in many human cultures, cannibalism – and I know it wasn’t technically cannibalism as I was human but fuck it, this was close enough, they were my crew for fuck’s sake – was common. It was part of the aljik funeral rite. I already knew this. I’d seen and accepted this.

I just… kind of wasn’t expecting to find myself suddenly eating someone who could well be one of my friends. Actually, it probably was a friend, if I understood the funeral thing properly. The fact that they’d given it to me was probably a sign of honour. Or purely logical, based on the fact that all of my food stores were in space now. I had no idea how my food was made or if the process was still possible on our new sporty minisized model of the Stardancer. Either way, this was what I had now, both in terms of practicality and the aljik’s gross, unnerving culture. I stared at the bowl.

Then I ate the food.

Every last smear of it. And I forced myself not to throw up. It was alright so long as I kept telling myself it was that cheap packet crab meat you can buy. Hopefully it wasn’t poisonous to me, but as usual these days, mere food toxicity was so far down my list of potential dangers that it was barely worth thinking about. And I was tired. Maybe that was just me needing to heal, or maybe it was a serious health problem. I was too tired to figure it out.

Before I could lay back and rest on the unnervingly accommodating tentacle of my giant squid friend, though, the shaft door opened again, and Captain Nemo herself stepped out into the ring. Like all aljik, she seemed uncomfortable with the high gravity, but she was easily strong enough that it didn’t give her any real problems. She stepped clumsily, and kept her wings folded tight under their carapace.

“Are you dying?” she asked in the increasingly universal pidgin language of the ship. I stared. Her gestures were clumsy and unpracticed, but the fact that she was using them at all kind of floored me.

“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “I’m unaware of any specific fatal problems, but I can’t diagnose much.”

“The ship is very short on engineers,” she replied clumsily. “We do not have an easy source of replacements.”

“I’ll endeavour not to die and inconvenience you, then,” I told her solemnly, careful to pack as many signs of aljik smartarsery as I knew into the message because she wouldn’t be able to read the human ones.

“The crew are at your disposal,” was all she said in reply. Then she left.

“What was that all about?” I asked Glath, who had followed her in and was kind of hovering awkwardly near the wall. I spoke in English, because moving my arms about for gesturing hurt.

“The ship has taken heavy losses,” he replied. “It is a time for readjustment.”

“Those losses include half the ship itself.” God, my ribs hurt. “So I’m guessing we won and are not currently captives of the Empire?”

“We won, for now. How long your second statement remains true is still uncertain. Much of the crew is dead, many of our supplies are unrecoverable, and several critical ship systems are compromised.”

“So I need to do some engineering?” I tried to stand, but Glath gently pressed me back down.

“It is being handled. Heal.”

“How long was I unconscious?”

“Nine hours.”

Nine hours. I had no idea if that was good or bad. Generally, trauma-induced unconsciousness was super bad for you, but after the initial passing out it could’ve just been normal sleep. Right? Not much I could do about it either way.

“What’s in this drip?” I asked.

“Saline. We did not know how long you would sleep and wished to prevent dehydration. I would like to do a physical inspection.”

“Sure thing, being coated in spiders is my favourite part of any good healthcare routine.”

Glath shifted into a human form to check my pulse and limbs in the ways shown in the first aid diagrams. He’d been doing that sort of thing a lot lately, claiming that it was easier to move around and carry things with human limbs than dohl ones. This didn’t sound right to me, as every aljik caste I’d met so far had better speed and strength than I did and so far as I could tell dohl were second only to the ridiculously overbuilt tahl in terms of physical power, but I wasn’t an expert in the physics of the communal strength of alien spiders. A lot of aljik strength might be based on their superstrong exoskeleton for all I knew, and Glath obviously wouldn’t be able to imitate that.

He was getting pretty good at looking human, though; he pulled all his spiders in close, giving him a tall but realistically human size, and I noticed with some surprise that he didn’t look like me any more. He still spoke in a creepy imitation of my voice, so that in Earth-strength atmosphere we sounded almost identical and in lower pressure atmosphere he sounded more like me than I did, but physically he looked like the most generic human shape I’d ever seen, albeit a shadow-black, very tall one. The figure was probably an amalgamation of human pictures in textbooks, and was pretty accurate but for the colour. He had toned imitation muscles on his imitation bare arms and all of his facial features were surprisingly distinguishable given the resolution he had to work with. If I had to take a gun-to-my-head guess, I’d guess the figure was male, but it was too genetic to be certain; my assumption was probably based more on the height and muscle tone than anything. His fingers were hard and bumpy against by skin, but felt firm as fingers rather than a cloud of spiders.

As he inspected my casts and peeked at the wounds under my various plasters (mostly abrasions with a couple of deeper cuts; on Earth I’d probably just let them scab over without treatment), I was struck by an idea. I grabbed my phone. Huh… a four-hour video I didn’t remember taking. Must have butt-videoed from my belt. Hip-videoed? Whatever. I ignored it for now and looked back through other video clips. Older ones. Clips from before my abduction. I found the one I wanted.

“Here,” I said, handing him the phone just as he finished up.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a video I took at my dad’s birthday party. There’s a whole bunch of people talking in the background you can listen to. Humans. Your voice is… I mean, you’re great at imitation, but hearing you talk as me still creeps me the fuck out. I thought you could do with a bigger sample size.”

He took the phone carefully, as if I was bestowing upon him a Princess’ face decoration worth of precious jewels. “Thank you.”

“Just don’t break the phone, dude.”

He rustled inside, probably trying to translate ‘dude’. His denser human form muffled the rustling somewhat. “Don’t break your body,” he replied.

“I think we both know that it is way, way too late for that. By the way, who’s my new friend here?”

“The ketestri. She… has a name, but it cannot be pronounced with sound or gesture.”

“Portentious. Can you thank her for saving my arse?”

“Unfortunately not. My community can only spread out so much before its members lose communication with each other. There is an upper limit to my size, and it is too small to effectively communicate with ketestri.”

“Oh. Well, in that case, please thank everyone else who saved my arse, including yourself. And apologise to Tyzyth for me for his cutter, which I’m assuming I dropped into space when I passed out.”

“Most likely. I will do so.”

“Thanks dude.”

He left. I smiled up at the ketestri. It was not any less fundamentally terrifying, but if this crew could go from shitting themselves at the mere mention of my species to being my friends then I owed them the same effort.

“You and me, my giant space kraken friend, are gonna get along great,” I said. “As soon as I figure out how to actually talk to you.”


	18. We Can Only Try

Judging by how many photos and videos Charlie took on the Stardancer, I had expected her to have more footage of human voices from before she joined the crew. She didn’t; it was just the one birthday video. I watched it. The video wasn’t surprising; I had read enough of the human birthday ritual to understand each component and its function. I expected the cake, covered in fire for the man to extinguish. I expected the chant and the clapping and the exchange of token items concealed under bright paper. I knew about the cutting of the cake, and knew three separate superstitions about letting the knife make it to the bottom. But I wasn’t there to study the ritual. I was there to study the voices.

We ambassadors are pretty good at imitating shapes, within a certain size range, and some of use become very adept at imitating colour, although I never really had the knack for it. But what we are truly talented at is imitating sound. Even a small ambassador colony has several thousand wings, and every one of those wings can not only sense vibrations in the air but can beat to produce a very wide range of frequencies. While there is a maximum volume that we can produce, there are very few natural sounds too complex for us to imitate. Human speech was nothing.

I listened to the recording several times, corrected for distortion based on Charlie’s voice in the recording, and memorised what the voices probably actually sounded like. Then I used those samples to try to make a non-Charlie voice. Well, actually all I did was lower the pitch and adjust the timbre so that both were within the demonstrated human range but didn’t match any of the voices, then altered the pacing of my speech so that it didn’t match Charlie’s. It was difficult to be sure, based on my sample size, whether I had created a realistic voice. Charlie would know.

But I didn’t return the phone right away.

Because humans don’t just blare their voices indiscriminately from their skin, like I normally did. Humans produce sound in a very specific way. My human form has a rudimentary approximation of a skeleton and muscles, with compromises to match my physiology, but it doesn’t have organs. Human organs don’t do anything that I need. When pulling my community in so dense, I do need to worry about airflow, but a human circulatory system is liquid and the general shape doesn’t approximate what I need; I had to figure out my own system of air flow. There was no reason, however, that I could not create cavities in my chest for ‘lungs’ and use them to project sound through a channel and out of my ‘mouth’.

I tried this. It didn’t work.

Humans vocalise by pushing air from the lungs through moist membranes that vibrate to create the sound waves. The air pressure and membrane tightness determine volume and pitch of the overall sound. These are refined into a complex signal by being shaped by soft and hard tissues inside the mouth, and projected. I couldn’t simulate any pat of this system; I didn’t have anything stretchy or any way to coat it in mucous. I didn’t have soft tissues and couldn’t make any part of my system reliably airtight. So I had no choice but to cheat and simulate the effect; I ditched the lungs and throat, ‘breathed’ by altering the density of my colony in my chest area, and synchonised this expansion and contraction with wingbeats in and around my ‘mouth’. Then it was a simple matter of manipulating mouth shape in sync with human sounds, and compensating for this with wingbeats so that the mouth movement didn’t distort the signal. Very easy, with practice. Without practice, Charlie would probably deem it ‘creepy’, but once I had all of the movements synced properly…

I opened my ‘mouth’, took a deep ‘breath’, and sang Happy Birthday in my new unique voice.

It seemed to work.

I returned the phone to Charlie. “Thanks,” she said, taking it and trying to hide the fact that she was giving it a once-over to make sure it wasn’t broken. “Congrats on the voice, by the way. Very customer service.”

I inferred from context that this must be a good thing. “Sorry to take your phone for so long. Do you watch that video often?”

“To tell you the truth, I’d completely forgotten I’d taken it until the other day,” she said with a shrug. “Contrary to current evidence, I’m not really a memento kind of person.”

“But it’s the only video you have of – ”

“So what?” she asked, an edge in her voice. “What would watching home movies accomplish? The people in that video don’t exist any more.”

“I am sure your family is fine.”

“Oh, I’m sure they are. But they’re different. That was… shit, I don’t even know how long I’ve been missing. Even if we magically had some way to communicate, we wouldn’t be the same people talking to each other any more. So no, I don’t sit here crying about the past, I sit here bored out of my skull while my body very, very slowly tries to knit itself back together again. Sorry. I’m grumpy.”

She was usually grumpy. “Can I get you anything?”

“Is it worth asking for enough alcohol to get properly drunk?”

“No.”

“Then can you try to find my laptop? I think I left it in the control ring. At least I hope I did.”

“I will look for it.”

“Thanks.”

I left. The strange anger, the ‘jealousy’, that I had been feeling over Charlie had left the moment our ship was torn in half and our lives changed, but my feelings were no less complicated. The more I learned about humans, the more I felt… badly… about bringing her aboard the Stardancer. The shaft door closed behind me and gravity dropped in the access shaft as I leaned against the wall and contemplated this. Introspection is not one of my strengths. It’s not a skill I have ever really needed; aljik are highly social and their social and emotional frameworks are, while highly complex in detail, not all that broad in scope. Logically dissecting the emotions and behaviours I imitate as a dohl is reasonably trivial after a few years of practice, and I’d always had other very helpful dohl around to assist me. But ever since we had followed the Faceless Princess into space, our world had been changing very quickly, and somehow it seemed to be changing more and more quickly all the time. I wondered if the others were keeping up better than I was. They seemed to be. There were things happening that I didn’t entirely understand, and I wasn’t sure what to do.

What was happening to me?

I simulated a deep breath. This is something that humans do to calm down. The dual effect of diaphragmatic pressure (which subtly influences lymphatic and blood pressure) and the sudden oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange temporarily slows the heart rate, which slightly depresses the sympathetic and activates the parasympathetic nervous system, because the human body is basically just a bunch of separate feedback mechanisms periodically sampling data from each other to approximate coordinated action. I simulated the breath, and I stilled my community slightly, linking the action very slightly with the response; it was just a matter of practice. If I did it about a thousand more times, I wouldn’t have to manually think about it as much. A million or so times and it would start to become automatic. The shaft stopped spinning; I was in zero gravity, the atmosphere around me now at the mercy of the for-the-time-being airtight repairs to the cut-off end of the central axle. Like everyone else, I wanted to spent as little time in that space as possible, but I didn’t shift back to my dohl form and head for the control room right away. Every day, moving around in that shape seemed more laborious, and I didn’t know what…

No. I knew exactly what was wrong with me, didn’t I?

I looked down at my human hands. I pointed my head at them to do this; this made no difference to my ability to perceive them, but I’d practiced head-aiming, because it was an important part of communication. I looked at my hands and clenched them into fists and I didn’t cheat like I normally did with movement, simply rearranging my colony to make fist-shaped blobs like I would have closing my claws as a dohl. Each finger maintained its shape, and where they pressed against my palms, bug on bug, it felt like two separate surfaces pressing on each other.

Of course I knew what was wrong with me. I’d known for a while.

I knew why I’d come out here, thrown caution to the wind and boarded the original Stardancer. I knew it wasn’t because I necessarily liked or trusted the Princess any more than the Queen, and it wasn’t because I’d been any fonder of Kit than my other templates. It wasn’t because I had any particular interest in the Empire’s politics or any desire to risk my life supporting one candidate over another. It was because the Stardancer, more than anything else happening at the time, promised to show me something new. The one thing the Faceless Princess could always promise was something new, exciting, different; a radical strategy, a different location, another species to interact with. And really, any protests I’d ever had over acting as a translator had been protests of principle and personal dignity rather than a reluctance to try a new shape. I’d gone with the Stardancer because I needed something that wasn’t on the homeworld and wasn’t within the confined roles of service to the Empire. I’d come out here because being a dohl wasn’t, no matter how many years I’d spent doing it or how much I denied it to myself, what I wanted. It was just the mask I was used to. But I didn’t want to spend my life being a mask.

I took another calming breath and changed shape, putting the mask back on. The crew of the Stardancer was going through enough dramatic changes right now. Me being difficult wouldn’t help anyone.

I checked to make sure all my limbs and mandibles were in the right place, that my communities were aligned to give the visual impression of solid chitin rather than yielding flesh, and headed for the control ring.

* * *

So here was the situation.

The Stardancer, prior to its impromptu surgery generously provided by the Empire, was basically a long tube of rotating rings, each with an isolated atmosphere whose pressure could be varied and that could rotate at variable speed to increase or decrease its inertia-based simulated gravity. The central corridor opened at each end to a large dome chamber that didn’t spin, so all of the zero-gravity processing, like water filtration, was shoved in these big end rooms, and at the end of each of these domes was an airlock, because some gibbering idiot who really really hated engineers thought that two external airlocks was enough for a massive ship that would need regular external maintenance. Each of these dome ends also sports a huge metal X made of big thick bars wide enough for me to stand inside, which rotate slowly. I’d been introduced to these bars as storage for the inconveniently placed engine and shielding apparatus that had killed my predecessor, as well as some boring ship machinery that required a vacuum, but this wasn’t their only function. Remember all those spinning rings? Well, even if you alternate the direction of each ring, the chances of their rotation balancing each other out is pretty slight, especially with the mass in each ring changing constantly and the access shafts between then accelerating and decelerating every time somebody moved around the ship. The big point of the giant X’s was as rotational ballast. They spun to cancel out any unbalanced spin in the rest of the ship and keep the central axle, as well as all of that important zero gravity filtration equipment, in zero gravity. This had the added bonus of not making the gravity in every ring trend up and down like an indecisive shopper two minutes from closing time every time something accelerated or the ship’s mass distribution changed, fucking up everyone’s balance.

This is all stuff I’ve complained about before. What I haven’t spoken about is the air, water and power supply to the rings. This is because I only barely understand how rotating rings are safely supplied with these things. But they’re provided through pipes and wires in the walls of the central corridor, that’s what’s important here.

Because that corridor was cut in half. Meaning that we lost the following:

  * The environmental rings for the aljik, ketestri, and myself, at cost to many lives

  * Two rings’ worth of material storage, including both important repair equipment and supplies

  * A fair amount of our solar power array and our heat distribution system

  * The ability to stabilise our gravity. We could spin the remaining rings at any speed we wanted, but the X on one side was missing, and having it only on one end threw us off balance. Some very clever drakes were monitoring this system constantly to stop us from suddenly lurching into the sky at random, but occasional vertigo was just something we had to deal with. (I’d pulled my drip out as soon as I heard this. I didn’t think it would matter for just saline, but it’s the principle of the thing.)

  * The ability to regulate temperature as much as we’d like. I’d never thought of the ability to turn the air conditioning on and off as a luxury, but it sure was now. The temperature in the ring I now shared with our friendly neighbourhood ketestri was no longer under my control, and tended to hover around an annoyingly chilly twelve degrees celsius, with random unexplained spikes and dips as high as forty or as low as five degrees. This was not an ideal healing environment, but the whole ship was now part of a carefully balanced temperature control system controlled at the bridge. If the crew could survive it, it was fair game.

  * Quite a lot of the air, water and other piped materials that were cycling through the ship at the time. These were pissed away into space when their pipes were severed. Sealing the air pipes had been job number one for Tyzyth and his crew of atil and drake helpers (I took a moment to feel smug about teaching him to communicate with drakes when I heard this), but water supply was intermittent. A large chunk of our emergency air and water reserves had been in the lost half of the ship. Fortunately, most of the air recycling systems were in the big zero-gravity end dome that we still had, so we weren’t suffocating.

  * The remains of my patience for this stupid fucking space adventure. Seriously, this was getting out of hand. Everything that had happened to me since I went out to photograph the stars from Earth had been ludicrous. What kind of godly power did I piss off to bring this upon myself?




I lost quite a few friends in the battle. Everyone did. Nil, a little atil who I’d always admired for her straightforwardness and honesty, was absent – nobody knew how she died. Taksin, one of my drake friends who was a particularly strong driving force in the development of our universal version of his language, had been killed in an escape pod, trying to reach the bridge. It was sheer bad luck that he was even in the removed part of the ship; the drake ring wasn’t there. Kerlin, my computer system tutor, was alive, but he’d lost a wing and one of his forelimbs didn’t work. He’d also lost three tails, but tails grow back. He was one of the lucky ones.

We temporarily gained two new tahl when a couple of surviving Empire soldiers, seeing how the battle was going, defected. Captain Nemo immediately ordered them executed. Tahl were extremely valuable on our poorly guarded ship, but she couldn’t risk traitors. I was unconscious while all this took place; I never had to decide whether to defend these prisoners who had gotten my friends killed. By the time I woke up, it was already done. We were able to salvage some parts and supplies from the military ship, but a lot of military stuff has tracking devices all through it, so most of it had to be abandoned.

Oh, and there was one other problem. As I said, most of our reserve water had been lost, and the water being cycled through the ship had evaporated into space. This wasn’t an immediately deadly problem, especially with our reduced crew – Yarrow and Tyzyth were able to rig up a rudimentary filtration system out of spare parts and cannibalised parts of the air filtration system (which was designed to filter air for a much bigger space and higher population than it now had to deal with), which should work fine for our crew until we could dock and repair somewhere. Or get a real spaceship. That’d be good. I wasn’t sure exactly how wanted our glorious leader the rebel Princess was, but judging by our interactions with the military so far, docking anywhere sounded more dangerous to me that just drifting around space hoping to capture a ship. But what do I know? I’m just an engineer.

Anyway. The problem. Our reserve water, while enough to sustain us once the pipes were repaired, had a problem. That problem was that the bulk of said water was contaminated with a highly toxic, notoriously difficult-to-filter chemical that tended to destroy aljik water filters very quickly. It could be easily distilled, but that would upset the delicate heat control systems now in place in the ship.

Yep. Because the universe hates me, most of our water now came down to the ethanol tank.

Charlie MacNamara: Space Pirate, Intrepid Adventurer, Master Engineer, Interspecies Linguist… Ridiculously Overbuilt Water Filter.

Alcohol being a reasonably good painkiller, this actually wouldn’t have been too bad if the crew let me have nearly enough of it. No matter how many times I explained, with varying levels of patience, that it was completely fine and my earlier hangover was not a sign that alcohol would kill me, or that please oh god please can I just have enough to let me sleep, I was given small amounts of watered alcohol at various increments. We couldn’t put my piss into the system until the new water filter was built anyway, so nobody was in a huge hurry to kill the engineer in an effort to get water quickly. It tasted awful, by the way. I didn’t have any sugar or anything to dissolve in it, so I was just drinking water, alcohol, and trace amounts of some other unimportant but gross-tasting microbial byproducts. And probably dead alien microbes, too, but I couldn’t taste those.

To be fair to the crew, limiting my alcohol intake when we had no way to assess or potentially treat any internal injuries was probably a good idea. After I didn’t turn yellow and die, I figured that my liver probably wasn’t a pile of goo, but still. No sense tempting fate.

I did start coughing up small amounts of blood after my little Open Space Military Adventure, which by the way hurts an awful lot with broken ribs. This did not alarm me nearly as much as it would have on Earth. After all the air pressure changes, atmosphere changes, gravity variations and general physical trauma I’d been putting myself through since coming aboard, I had been getting sort of weirded out that my lungs had held up so well for so long. I didn’t know much about spaceflight but I was pretty sure all of those things were supposed to be super bad for you. There was nothing I could do about the lungs, so I just made sure to sleep on my front (my side wasn’t an option with my ribs) and waited to see if they’d heal or drown me. They healed. ‘Another thing’, my inner Kate said, ‘that could easily have resulted in a nasty infection’.

I was far from the only invalid on the ship. An awful lot of the survivors had injuries related to space exposure, being minced up by tahl, or crushing damage from being swallowed by their huge space squid ally in an effort to keep them alive. I couldn’t talk to any of them; we were all confined to our environmental rings under the logic that moving through a bunch of different gravities and air pressures to move about the ship was likely to have a negative impact on healing. This seemed like a reasonable, if frustrating, rule. And the only crew on board comfortable healing in the marvellously high gravity and air pressure of Earth were me, and my new ketestri friend.

Who I couldn’t talk to, no matter how I tried. It was very frustrating. I knew they were intelligent; I’d watched them display a lot of tactical thinking in our fight to save the ship. But there was some kind of insurmountable communication barrier, they just… couldn’t seem to fathom my intention of communication. Or maybe they could, and it was me who couldn’t fathom their response. Hard to say. Anyway, something wasn’t working there. I’d had some difficulty communicating with the rest of the crew, of course, but this had mostly been about getting them to understand the concept. Communication was harder for them than me, but it was possible. The ketestri problem didn’t feel like a more extreme version of the same kind of problem – this was a difference in kind, not scale. And I couldn’t figure out exactly what the issue was.

After a day or so with my phone, Glath returned with it and a new voice. It was a bit too robotic to sound natural but at least he didn’t sound exactly like me any more. I asked him to try to find my laptop, which I had vague memories of leaving on the bridge. He said he’d look.

Good news: my laptop had indeed been on the bridge. Bad news: I’d just left it sitting on a little shelf under Kerlin’s terminal. This wasn’t normally a problem, except for the fact that the ship had then been cut in half with a giant laser, which tends to launch the two halves of a ship away from each other rather violently due to air pressure. The control equipment on the bridge is all firmly wired to the ship, but that sort of thing tends to make stuff fly off shelves. My laptop had some cracked parts. Would it still work? No idea. I’d left it in sleep mode, because what real person actually shuts down their laptop after every use, and the battery had run completely down. My charger was in my old environmental ring – that is, my charger was now drifting off in space somewhere. I’d have to make a new one, and I wasn’t entirely sure what they did. They took in wall power and changed its voltage and amps somehow. I had a wealth of information to teach me exactly how to do that… inside my currently-dead laptop. And that was assuming there weren’t any hardware problems.

I took the battery out and set it aside for now. None of my engineer’s tools were designed for working with human electronics, but I managed to find something still in my belt that could, with patience, catch on a screw, and opened the laptop. It was a tool I normally used to spread acid on exposed wire filaments to clean them, but hey, it worked. Removing all of the screws allowed me to access a couple of parts of the laptop, which I did not recognise. They were little plastic boxes with metal parts placed to touch metal parts in the laptop. That’s all I knew. I took photos (quickly and carefully; I’d realised by this point that I had no way to recharge my phone either and should probably start conserving the battery) so that I’d know how to put it back together, went to remove the back properly, and found that I couldn’t. All the screws were out but some kind of internal clip was holding it together. Probably to prevent arseholes like me from opening it up and voiding the warranty. I shrugged and broke the clips.

I stared inside the laptop. This, too, told me nothing. Thing was, I actually knew quite a lot about electronics by this point, what with all the spaceship maintenance. What I didn’t know was a damn thing about human electronics. There were big metal boxes. There were little plastic boxes. Wires went from some boxes to other boxes, or to a big plastic thing with metal bits all over it that sheer pop cultural exposure told me was a computer chip of some kind. I wasn’t sure what it did but it took up an awful lot of space.

I recognised the fan. It didn’t look broken. So that was something.

I took a picture and put the laptop back together. Between the impact of its initial fall and my tender ministrations, the case was a little cracked and shaky, but I got it on. I guessed I’d just have to find a way to power it up and hope for the best as far as everything else went.

If only I had the internet. I could fix any problem with the internet.

One problem I had that I actually could deal with (apart from the alcohol problem, which as I explained was far less fun to deal with than you’d imagine) was my broken tooth. It was fucking killing me. Every sip or bite drowned out every other pain in my body for half a second or so, which in some ways was actually a pretty nice break, but it made eating way harder than it needed to be and I needed to eat. I needed that energy to heal. (Sorry, dead crewmates, but you don’t need it any more. I tried not to think about that part. On good days, I was brought a new jerky, which was actually very meatlike and tasty; but on some days, it was dead aljik.)

I put up with this for several days, because there are no dentists in space. But I did not put up with it silently, because – you may have noticed this – I am not a suffer-in-silence kind of person. I talked poor Lln’s ear off about it every time she came to see me.

Lln is one of the few atil I can actually recognise. She’s a gentle, patient person – most atil are – and started following me around like a really big puppy when the interspecies communication project was really taking off. (Atil are small for aljik, but their body length is about that of a human.) She wasn’t the most articulate communicator, not being all that great at absorbing new information, but she was remarkably perceptive when it came to small details, endlessly patient, and tended to be proactive about getting random bullshit done that nobody else was doing. That’s the job of her caste, after all – run around and do all the menial bullshit that everyone else ignores. She took over a lot of my care pretty quickly, bringing me food and water and stuff (me being restricted to my ring and the pipes not being reliable), and was a good set of ears (or whatever aljik have) for endless whining, even if she didn’t understand all of it.

I liked and trusted Lln. This is because I am an idiot who keeps treating everybody around me like a human being, no matter how much evidence I am given to the contrary. I knew gentle, patient, caring humans, and I knew what to expect and how to predict their behaviour. Which was why I didn’t entirely understand what was going on when Lln and Tyzyth showed up together to visit me one day.

This wasn’t surprising, necessarily – Lln was always in and out, and Tyzyth sometimes brought me portable engineering projects so I could still usefully do my job and not want to claw my functioning eye out out of sheer idle boredom. Lln handed me some alcohol-tainted water and I, being a trusting idiot, drank it, then immediately choked. It was unexpectedly strong.

“You said it would help with the pain,” she explained.

“Aww, you snuck me undiluted? You are my new best friend, Lln. You are truly an angel.” I had to make up a sign for ‘angel’, then drank more alcohol to occupy myself before anybody could ask me to explain it. It was pretty strong. Lln handed me some clean water to chase it with.

Fun alcohol fact: if you immediately chase strong alcohol with water, it’s often difficult to tell if that water has a weaker dilution of alcohol in it if you’re not paying attention. And why would I be expecting something like that? I got pretty buzzed, anyway. Sharp, constant pain became soft background pain. I laid back, dizzy. Man, I really should’ve been paying attention to how much I was drinking. I was gonna have to sleep this off.

“Sorry,” I said to Tyzyth, signing very clumsily, “I didn’t even ask what you wanted from me?”

“Just for you to lay back and relax,” he said, taking a tool from his belt. It was a sort of clamp that acted like pliers. Is was a small, thin tool, but it was serious business. I’d seen him pinch off the ends of metal pipes with it.

“Hmm?” I asked. Man I was really, REALLY buzzed. Something was tickling my face. I went to brush it away; solid chitin. Lln gripped my face gently but firmly, laid me back, and opened my mouth.

“Don’t be afraid,” Tyzyth said soothingly, advancing with his tool in hand. “Glath explained this procedure in exacting detail. It’s a simple nonessential component removal.”

It was kind of too late to resist by then. Aljik are very strong, and in space, nobody gives a shit when they hear you scream.

I will say this: the dental procedure was less traumatic than Sulon stitching me up. The painkillers helped, as did the fact that I trusted these people. Admittedly I trusted them rather more before they drugged me and took pliers to my teeth, but still. I woke up to a mouth that hurt like fuck and a cheek carefully packed with something resembling gauze. Within a couple of days, the wound had mostly healed, and Tyzyth hadn’t left any annoying tooth fragments behind. For garage dentistry from dentists who probably didn’t really understand what teeth even were… hard to complain.

As in, it was hard for me to complain about anything. It had become scary to do so. If I did, somebody might try to fix the problem.

Eventually I was deemed healed enough to leave the damn ring. The incredibly professional procedure used to determine this was my insistence that I could walk around and breathe fine and didn’t feel dizzy so I was probably as good as I was going to get. The day after I made this declaration, I proved myself wrong because that was the day that my left eye regained vision without any explanation, but nobody except me seemed to notice this. I decided that I’d earned a celebratory ten minutes or so playing something on my phone (hey, it’s not like I’d run out of battery at the exact moment I desperately needed to photograph something, right? What would be the chances?), so I turned it on and saw the unexplained four-hour video on it that I’d completely forgotten about. Unfortunately, I didn’t have nearly four hours of charge left, so that would have to wait until after Project: Electricity.

I could charge my phone from my laptop, once I could charge my laptop. So I just needed to figure out how to charge my laptop.

No fucking problem. I was a space engineer, right? Surely I could figure out how to charge a simple human battery.

Right?


	19. A Failure of Imagination

Queen Tatik paced restlessly. This rogue Princess nonsense was getting out of hand. She should be well into consolidating more of the outlying regions of the Empire by now; there were several minor planets near the edge of her territory that contained valuable biological materials that would be very easily slaughtered with a short war, and others ideal for forcing into the gas mines which had been lagging in production lately, but she couldn’t pull together and initiate said war while the Princess was still out there. The Rainbow Destroyer had reported sighting a ship that was almost certainly the stolen prison, had moved to engage, and had disappeared. Tatik was getting location signals from the ship, but no reports from the crew. So she knew exactly where the Stardancer had been at the time of the attack, but had no idea what its current strength was. It had apparently defeated the Rainbow Destroyer, which worried Tatik; the prison was almost unarmed when it had been captured and the Destroyer carried some of the most powerful weaponry in her military that could be easily mobilised. This unexpected turn of event meant that she simply didn’t have the information to properly estimate her opponent. All of her estimations had been wrong. How had the Stardancer triumphed? Was it intact enough to flee the scene, or to fight back against another attack? If she sent more ships in, would it be an easy kill, or a devastating failure against an unknown weapon? They had a human, after all… anything involving a human was dangerous and unpredictable.

She looked to her control console, and hovered indecisively. She needed far more information. And she had no way of getting it.

* * *

So once I was out and about again I was immediately put to work, of course. Most of the critical systems had been repaired while I was out but half of a ship is basically a series of engineering disasters approaching at random rates. It occurred to me how ludicrously risky the ship was, and I mean before it was cut in half – the Stardancer might be technologically advanced but I’d gamble on a dinky little human spacecraft to the moon any day. Obvious example: the ship had two engineers who were supposed to work in tandem. Either of us could do minor repairs, especially internal ones, but a lot of external stuff was a two-engineer job. When Kakrt had died, they’d been at the mercy of random mechanical faults and had no choice but to drop by and kidnap a being mythologised in their own history as so absurdly dangerous that the foundations of the Empire had been built around avoiding them, and if I’d died then they would’ve been in that same situation except with only half a ship. Hell, if this disaster had happened before the crew started talking to each other, we’d probably all be dead – it was only by pulling in people like Yarrow to do my job that the ship was still limping along. The ship itself, even whole, was a ridiculous nightmare that I’ve whined about extensively already, but one thing I generally try not to think too much about is my space suit, and by extension Tyzyth’s space suits and the suit of everyone else who has a space suit. Oh, and the fact that apparently not the whole crew has an emergency space suit, because… what the fuck? Why would you not give everyone emergency suits in case… I dunno, in case your ship was CUT IN HALF BY A GIANT FUCKING LASER or something?

Anyway, when I’d first started wearing the sleek, creepily skinlike suit, I’d marvelled at how light and easy it was. It was basically an airtight jumpsuit, and I thought the tech that went into something that allowed me to move around in space with no more bulk than I’d wear to go skiing was pretty neat. Then I started learning about how the ship’s mechanisms worked, including those in the space suit, which brought certain realities to light. Part of the reason the suit is so much sleeker and more comfortable than anything you see human astronauts wear is indeed a matter of tech – light, strong, selectively permeable membranes beyond anything a human can make are trivial on the Stardancer.

But most of it is because it has no safety features whatsoever.

And I mean no safety features. I’ve already remarked on the lack of a radio, which seems like a stupid oversight to me, but do you know how pressure is regulated inside the suit? It’s a genius little system like this: it isn’t. Whatever the air pressure is when you put on the suit, that’s the air pressure you’re gonna have. The only concession in the matter of air pressure is a little valve that opens for a few seconds when you go to take the helmet off so that if you desuit in a different air pressure it’s mildly nauseating rather than making your eyes explode or whatever shit would otherwise happen (I’m not an astrobiologist). This is stupid. This is very, very stupid.

How about air. I’ve spoken many times about the breather I need to wear and the lovely, lightweight, flexible airtank in my suit. Something so convenient and high-tech just has to be safe, right? In actual fact, the air system comes down to a bunch of valves and a couple of bags. It’s very simple; the tanks themselves are a carbon dioxide-permeable bag (empty to start) and an oxygen-permeable bag (full to start). Some kind of careful chemistry binds those things to something else so they’re a semiliquid in the bags and aren’t under absurd amounts of pressure cramming shitloads of gas in them. (I was relieved to hear about this; it means that the bags won’t suddenly explode right into my chest, right? But then I read a bit more high school chemistry and learned that this probably meant that they could turn into a very fiery chemical explosion with a slight misstep instead. I was too scared to ask.) This is all pretty cool; oxygen is breathed from one bag, carbon dioxide collects in the other, the total volume of the bags doesn’t change all that much, and the relevant chemical processes are reversed then the tubes are taken out of the bags in a normal atmosphere to refill. All nice and scientific. The breather that goes into my mouth mixes the incoming gases with nitrogen from the air that’s already in my suit. Nitrogen isn’t used up in human breath, it just fills in space to stop the other gases from becoming toxic (both oxygen and carbon dioxide being pretty toxic to humans), so there’s no consumption issue there. All neat and efficient like a puzzle, right?

So what happens if I, for instance, breathe in or out of my nose, or if not all of the air I exhale is pushed into the filter? What happens, in short, if the air in my suit, rather than the bags, is ‘contaminated’ by my breath; what keeps the gases in that air at non-toxic levels?

Nothing.

The recommended solution for this potential problem is to breathe in suit air and breathe out into the mouthpiece if I feel like the carbon dioxide is making me woozy. To use my own lungs as the pump to filter this air. And if I pass out and can’t hold the breather in my mouth and suck on its delicious, delicious oxygen? This, apparently, is not a contingency planned for in high-tech alien space suit design. I’d been puzzle from the beginning why, when I’d first ended up on the Stardancer, Glath had insisted to me that most of the crew was unable to do my first repair because they weren’t equipped for movement outside the ship, but I was starting to understand why: it wasn’t so much that they couldn’t move in space, it was that nobody could be bothered to figure out how to make a space suit for them.

Anyway, I don’t normally bother with boring details like this, but this is the sort of perspective that controls the design of everything aboard the Stardancer. ‘Safety features’ stop at having reserve goods and escape pods, and I’m pretty sure that stuff was only there because it was already present when the ship was captured. Everything on the spaceship was half-arsed; I wouldn’t say it was all best-case-scenario stuff but man did the designers lack imagination when considering possible worst-case scenarios. There were just so many things for shit to go wrong that nobody seemed to have thought of.

Example: water distribution systems. It would probably be unreasonable for the designers of a space prison to consider ‘water system interruption due to ship being cut in half’ as a scenario that needed to be designed around, but I can think of dozens of problems that could stop water being moved through pipes, or be solved by removing water from the pipes. Following this logic, if one is using the water pipes to simultaneously cool the electrical system, then one should include some kind of contingency plan for overheating electronics in case the water system is interrupted. A backup cooling system, if you’re feeling fancy. A thermometer and an alarm. Or just anywhere, anywhere in the entire fucking system, SOME KIND OF HEAT-SENSITIVE FUCKING CIRCUIT BREAKER.

Anyway we lost power to half the ship when some fucking thing in the electrical system melted. Yeah, I know, it was a stolen ship and the prison staff probably knew to shut the power off if the water went out, but I am of the opinion that if you’re travelling in a metal tube in the middle of a deadly fucking void then there should be some kind of backup or failsafe beyond user error. The control room had power but very little else did, including half of our engines (which you might notice as being a quarter of the engines we were supposed to have), which meant that Tyzyth and I had to reshuffle our already pretty important list of repair jobs to make time for trying to figure out where the problem was, and how to fix it.

The spaceship had schematics, of course. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read them – not only because I could barely read anything on the computer screens as they broadcast light on frequencies I couldn’t see, but because I was still pretty unfamiliar with the language of aljik electrical diagrams. I was pretty unfamiliar with the language of human electrical diagrams, too, to be honest. Locating the problem area and cutting into the wall of the central corridor to get to the cables was simple, but the actual repair was, like everything else on this stupid fucking spaceship, a two-engineer job, and it was slightly too complicated for our usual engineers’ sign. This meant that Tyzyth had to read the schematics and explain each step to me while we were working, using our modified drake language. Not really a problem. But said language has a lot of verbal components and my stupid fucking space suit has no say of letting me hear sound, so I was doing this repair without wearing a helmet. Which was doable. We were inside, after all.

We were inside the central corridor. The corridor that was recently sliced in half. That was currently holding atmosphere due to a hasty repair job done with whatever was lying around, which looked to me like a bit of tarp glued over the huge gaping hole. And I was up to my elbows in a mass of partly melted wires, less than twenty metres from the place where I’d been sucked out of this very spaceship without warning and almost died. I kept being distracted by the sight of a particular shaft access door that I was pretty sure had broken my finger on my way out.

I was in a bad mood, is where this is going.

“Tyzyth,” I said in what I thought was a pretty patient tone, “can I or can I not cut this huge fucking cable that is directly in front of the batch of teeny tiny little wires that you want me to pull out?” (Neither drake nor engineers’ sign has an equivalent term for ‘fuck’, but the crew had readily accepted mine.)

“That depends. Is it the lateral axiomatic cable or the primary heating cable?”

“It is a cable. It is as wide as my arm. It is covered in white insulation. That is all of the information I have.”

“There are two cables like that. Which one is in the way?”

“Then we need to check this atmosphere for hallucinogenic gases, because all that I’m seeing with my eyes is one fucking cable.”

“Is the infra-red striping lateral or… oh.”

“Should we just switch jobs?”

“It’s dangerous for me to release this before those wires are sealed back in.”

“Dangerous how? No, you know what; don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’ll just work around the fucking cable.” I worked around the fucking cable. I pulled a bunch of fine wires whose insulation had melted together out of a bunch of very tiny holes, tucked the mess into my belt (it becomes habit not to just toss scrap aside when you work in zero gravity a lot), and took new very tiny wires from my belt so that I could very carefully use them to bridge small gaps, jamming them in place with very tiny tweezers. Side note: I don’t know what exactly the wire insulation was made of, but it stank. Badly. I hoped the fumes weren’t too toxic. This job was already tedious and difficult, but it was made more difficult than it had to be by the lack of gravity, my still-blurry left eye and the aforementioned fucking cable. I put them in place. I extracted my arm from the wall. I gave Tyzyth the go-ahead to release his cables. He pulled his arm out of the wall.

“That did we just fix?” I asked.

“Lighting systems.”

“Oh, good. I love being able to see. It occurs to me, though, that since we’re basically sitting ducks for the military right now, engines might be a priority.”

“Until we can get shielding up to initiate a dash, engines are pretty pointless for that. And we can’t repair that shielding without – ” Tyzyth broke off as an alarm sounded. I jumped and glanced back at the hole I’d just pulled my arm out of, wondering if I’d fucked something up, but of course that wasn’t the problem; we’d turned the electricity off before working because we weren’t total morons. Besides, it was optimistic to expect safety alarms of any kind in our stolen little deathtrap.

It was an alarm that I quickly recognised. The ship proximity alarm.

Eeeeergh. One of the major defining characteristics of space was supposed to be that _there was almost nothing in it_.

I went to cower in my ring like a good little engineer. No fucking way was I getting involved this time.

* * *

Nelan waited until all noise and movement in the Raibow Destroyer stopped. Then he waited for it to start again. Then he waited for it to stop again.

Only when he was completely sure that he was alone did he climb out of his hiding place in the control panel. He moved unsteadily as he did so; he’d had to sacrifice two legs and the bulky, protruding part of both of his mandibles to fit. Legs and mandibles grew back. His space suit sagged around him, being shaped to hold an intact engineer. He ignored this and surveyed the scene. Damage: extensive. They’d gutted the ship, of course. They’d even taken his dead crew members. He was lucky that they hadn’t questioned the lack of an engineer and looked for him more extensively. Perhaps they’d seen his cast-off limbs and assumed that he was already dismembered in battle.

The control array he’d hidden behind was intact. It was a valuable unit and riddled with trackers and he’d guessed, correctly, that the rogue Princess would leave it alone rather than risk bringing those aboard. Food and water were gone, most spare parts supplies were gone, even his tools were gone. He wouldn’t survive for long, then.

First: find the Stardancer and get a report to the Queen. Then: atmospheric integrity, to live long enough to get a reply and execute his orders. Then: repair the ship as best he could. Yes. That was a plan.

The Rainbow Destroyer had been sent away from the Stardancer once it was gutted. It looked like the crew had simply turned it around and locked its engines on, but the Destroyer had backups which cut the engines if there hadn’t been a pilot input command for a while, so the ship hadn’t been accelerating for quite some time. Nelan turned it around and headed in the opposite direction. He repaired his scouting and proximity detection equipment as he moved. As best he could without tools.

The Stardancer had barely moved from the battle site. In fact, it looked like most if not all of its movement had been pure inertia, if his calculations were right. It might be experiencing engine trouble. Excellent news. He only dared get close enough to identify the ship, no closer; he didn’t want them seeing him too. Then he backed out of range, and got to work on his communication systems.

He’d keep pace with the Stardancer, out of sight as much as he could be, to track her location. All he needed to do was live long enough to repair communications and get a message to the Queen.

* * *

So the ship alarm turned out to be about nothing. Something had been picked up way out in the middle of nowhere, but it was hard to make out and had immediately moved on. Everyone was relieved. We weren’t in a position to capture or fight a ship, and we had nothing to trade with one.

I reflected briefly on just how doomed we were, and wondered why I wasn’t despairing more. Shouldn’t I be weeping in terror instead of getting futile repairs done? In the end, I decided to blame modern entertainment. Our TV and books and shit are designed to give the impression that the Heroic Underdog (designed in such a way that any reader will think they are the Heroic Underdog) will triumph more gloriously the worse things seemed, so a lifetime of those messages probably convinced people on some fundamental level that we’re all immortal and everything would work out.

Thanks, books and TVs and shit. That kind of high-strength denial was keeping me alive.

Naturally, it was only after I was up and about again that I found a way to communicate on some level with the ketestri I shared my quarters with. It would’ve been great to have somebody to interact with during my incredibly boring healing time, but no, it was only after I became really busy and tired a lot of the time that this became a possibility. It was entirely by accident, in fact; I couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to wear by phone battery down, so I’d scrounged a hull marker (think: alien sharpie that can work in pretty much any air pressure), drew a board out on the floor of our ring, and played the single-player version of Chinese Checkers for awhile, using random junk as game pieces. The next night, I came back to our ring to see the ketestri playing the game, using some of its finer tentacles to carefully move the pieces around on the board. I watched. It seemed to understand the rules perfectly.

Hmm.

Well, the next step was obvious: learn how to game with my new buddy. I spent a long time pondering how to teach the multiplayer version. I wasn’t sure how to communicate there being two separate players to a being that I had no linguistic common ground with. I spent like half an hour puzzling this before the extremely obvious solution hit me, and once my work schedule died down a bit I just invited Glath over and played it with him where the ketestri could watch us.

Boom. Common ground. Admittedly being able to play a game wasn’t like being able to talk, but hey, it was a start. If we could somehow use this as a basis to establish common meaning of some physical gestures…

Glath wasn’t very good at Chinese Checkers, but then again, neither was I. He was beating me. I wished I had a deck of cards or something. I was sure I could find something to make one. I bet I could annihilate Glath at poker.

“I don’t understand why you can’t use your amazing alien translator tech to talk to the ketestri,” I said. “Does it only work on verbal language or something?”

“I don’t have a translator for the ketestri’s language,” Glath said as he moved his final piece into place to totally kick my arse for the third time. (He was in his human form for this; aljik aren’t really built fro moving around tiny game pieces sitting on the floor.) “I only have one for your language. The Jupiterian whose contraband we raided had very select and specific resources.”

I blinked. “Okay, I’m missing a chunk of backstory here. What Jupiterian?”

“The one whose translator I have.”

“Glath, you’re going in circles.”

“When we captured this ship and christened it our Stardancer, there was a Jupiterian prisoner aboard. It was a temporary stay; this is an oxygen-atmosphere ship so non-oxygen breathers are difficult to house. They’d been caught trying to sneak over to Earth, which they still do occasionally, and this ship happened to be the closest to the Earth cordon at the time, but this meant that it was impossible for us to orchestrate their escape with the other prisoners. Then, when we lost Kakrt to the rotary arm, the Jupiterian offered their information and resources on humans in exchange for Tyzyth’s assistance in altering one of the escape pods for Jupiterian use. The Princess agreed. You know the rest of the story.”

“And this is where you got your huge suspicious bag-o’-American-cash?”

“Yes. The Jupiterian assured us that it was the appropriate exchange system, but I do not think their information was particularly complete. They did not warn us that it would only work on one continent. We’re actually quite lucky that we picked up somebody who even speaks the translator language.”

“Wait. Wait a fucking minute. Jupiuterian translators involve brain surgery, right? If you’re telling me that this entire fucking time you’ve been talking to me through some poor bastard’s – ”

“No, no! It is a human translator. Made by humans.”

“That’s impossible, we don’t have that kind of technology.”

Glath reached into his abdomen, pulled out the translator, and placed it in my lap. I looked at it. Then at Glath, then back down.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” was all I could say.

I recognised it, of course, even as battered and torn as it was. Big pieces were missing, including the cover, but just a glance told me exactly what I had in my lap.

“Are you telling me,” I said slowly, “that you learned my language from a big-arse fucking dictionary?”

“It was very difficult to get enough of a language base for context for new terms,” he said.

I stared, and realised why the rustling of Glath’s translating had always sounded so familiar. He was just turning the pages of a fucking book.

“But… but spelling doesn’t even match up with pronunciation properly...” I said.

“The pronunciation is included,” he said, dropping a spider onto ‘belatedly’ to indicate the phonetic spelling. “Although when the pronunciation varies a lot from the first letter, reference is difficult. The Jupiterian taught me the phonetic notation.”

“Of course he did,” I muttered. I handed the dictionary back.

“You can keep it if you wish. I have read it.”

I shrugged, then frowned at him. “Hey,” I said slowly, “you have a really good memory, don’t you?”

“I suppose?”

“Well you must if you remember the dictionary. And you read a lot of my texts. Do you remember how to turn voltage and amp numbers into electron speed and flow?”

“Of course.” He wrote down the formulae for me. After he left, I read my laptop’s power requirements off the case, then translated it into electrons. Then I translated that into aljik units.

I checked this three times, then took it to Tyzyth and asked him to check it. This involved a lot of drawing tally marks and soforth, because neither of us was entirely familiar with the other’s mathematical systems. Mine counts in whole units as a basis and you can use that to abstract fractions and part numbers and soforth; the aljik do some crazy bullshit where they slice things into fractions and abstract whole numbers from it. It makes zero sense to me, but it works, so the problem there is probably more to do with my poor human brain than anything. Anyway, the numbers checked out. So I grabbed a bunch of spare wires of varying resistance, asked Tyzyth to ask the ship’s computer to calculate what I should do for me (because I’d done enough algebra for one day), and built myself a laptop adaptor. Well, I built myself a nest of wires and plastic that contained a couple of bare wire ends that I could connect to a laptop to do the same thing as an adaptor, anyway. I had the feeling that this would be easier to do with human components – I’d seen diagrams in my stolen textbooks and I was pretty sure it was basically a wire loop with some resistors and something to only let the electricity go one way. Guess what doesn’t have such components lying around in units useful for human devices? A fucking spaceship, apparently. Zooming through space faster than light was apparently a doable thing, but individual resistors for small electrical loads? Nope.

Fuckign aliens. Anyway, the maths said that what I’d built would work, even if it looked like a tiny metallic cthulhu trying to have sex with several lego pieces.

Excitedly, I wired my abominable fire hazard into the wall through one of the many access holes we’d cut, quadruple-checked the input requirements written on my laptop, and ran into an immediate problem.

Laptops run on DC current, like most household appliances. This is not a problem, and turning AC current into DC was a big part of the job of my confusing wire nest. This was the problem: DC has a direction for the current to flow in. This is what the D in the name is for. Of the two wires in my hand, the electrons would move out of one, through the laptop, and back into the other. It was pretty easy to see the two separate metal surfaces inside the charging socket that I needed to attach the leads to, and while they weren’t exactly placed to make charging them by poking wires in easy or safe (look inside the socket on a laptop and you’ll see what I mean immediately), that wasn’t my biggest problem. My biggest problem was this: I didn’t know which was which. I didn’t know what direction the electricity was supposed to flow in.

For fuck’s sake.

* * *

“What’s your analysis?” the Queen asked.

Etk inspected the data again. This really wasn’t his area of expertise. He was most comfortable out commanding a ship, but ever since his last brush with the Stardancer, the Queen had been keeping him close to home with military administration and analysis. He wasn’t sure whether it was a promotion or a demotion.

The data, unfortunately, could be interpreted to mean anything. The Rainbow Destroyer had been put under the command of Syl, whom Etk himself would not have chosen – grandiose, reckless showboating was not a good strategy against a rogue Princess who needed to be eliminated as quietly and quickly as possible, and his unpredictability made the data very difficult to read. The Rainbow Destroyer hadn’t communicated since launching the attack; they had only its location data to go on. He did his best.

“Well,” he said, “obviously their communications are out.”

“Obviously.”

“As for their might… it’s very likely that their engineer is alive. They appear to have engaged in a battle, been sent adrift on nonfunctional engines, and then had restored engine function. I don’t think Syl, the atil or the tahl could have managed the repair.”

“They might not have been sent adrift. They might have fled.”

“With this speed and trajectory? No, their flight was powered, to here...” he pointed on the map… “then unpowered from here. That’s the cutout time if the engines aren’t attended. If Syl had ordered the Destroyer to flee and then turn around later, it’s unlikely that he would’ve cut the engines there, then coasted for so long before turning. Mechanical failure is the most likely explanation.”

“Is Syl alive?”

“I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

“I can’t, my Queen. The ship has somebody aboard, because it’s turned around and is dogging a drifting mass, which is probably the Stardancer. Judging by the size of the Destroyer and what we know of the Stardancer’s systems, I think they’re trying to track the Stardancer but stay out of sight. They’re not attacking, so the Stardancer outclasses them even after the battle, but it could by Syl waiting for an opening, or it could be one of the tahl.” Etk did not say that it was difficult to tell Syl’s activity from that of a tahl because Syl was a simple-minded idiot with an inflated concept of his own prowess and no sense of risk awareness. That would have been undiplomatic. “At least some of the tahl must be alive, though. Syl wouldn’t be tracking if he had no chance of fighting, and the laser is either ineffective or destroyed.”

“And what of the Stardancer? Is my sister alive?”

“Oh, yes. Her Court would not drift without a leader. They would have killed any aliens aboard who would make things difficult, co-opted the Destroyer or surrendered to Syl depending on who was stronger, and come home.”

The Queen shifted uncomfortably at this analysis. She tried to hide it, but Etk knew her well.

“You disagree with my conjecture?”

“No. Go on.”

“What aren’t you telling me, my Queen?”

“Nothing relevant to your job.”

“… Very well. She must be still alive, or they would have defaulted to your legitimacy.” Etk watched the Queen carefully as he said this, but she made no further suspicious movements. “However, if we assume that the Destroyer is tracking them and we extrapolate their location from the Destroyer… they are drifting. They’ve not made any attempt to leave the battlefield, beyond what looks like inertial drift.”

“A risky decision.”

“Yes. They have no way of knowing whether the Rainbow Destroyer has backup in the area.”

“Your conclusion?”

“Two possibilities. They might be badly crippled and lacking engines. If this is the case, they will have almost no maneuvrability, and should be easy to destroy if we can get backup there before they repair.”

“And the second option?”

“It’s a trap. They fled the Lightbeam with no trouble. The evidence suggests that they have somehow made a prison ship invulnerable to our strongest military lasers, or have disabled one. We know that they defeated and drifted the Rainbow Destroyer, which makes it reasonable to assume that the entire Destroyer crew is dead. They could have destroyed the communication systems so they would not have to falsify messages, and have somebody out there dragging the Destroyer around to mislead us and tempt another attack.”

“And then do whatever they did to the Rainbow Destroyer to the rest of our military. You think that the Rogue can accomplish that?”

“You know her better than I do, my Queen. But she has brought humans aboard.”

“You are certain that that is what you saw? That she would do something so reckless?”

Etk looked meaningfully around them, at the open scenery of the Empire’s homeworld littered with huge, mechanical buildings that had once been components of Queen Anta’s flagship. “If you wanted to topple an Empire’s rightful ruler, where would you go for help?”


	20. A Game of Lies

I resisted the urge to pull the laptop apart again to find out which way the current was supposed to go, because I already knew it wouldn’t tell me. Why would it? Instead I spent a couple of days, or at least I assume I did as I didn’t have any active clocks, doing repairs to various ship systems and losing at Chinese Checkers to the ketestri. When I got bored of losing, I taught them draughts, and lost at that instead. We weren’t making any headway in terms of general communication but I was definitely learning how outmatched I was in basic logic games.

I was glaring resentfully at my laptop for the ten billionth time when Tyzyth, who happened to be dropping by to get some cabling (the low population of my environmental ring meant it was doubling as storage), said “Doesn’t it have a detachable battery?”

“Yeah,” I said. “So?”

“Well if you’re worried about destroying the circuitry, why not remove and charge the battery instead? If you break that, you can try direct power to the device afterward, or devise a method to reconstruct it. But it gives you more chances without destroying the machine.”

Whelp. I’m an idiot.

Not only was Tyzyth right about me getting more chances to fuck up, but it’s way easier to tell which way around to charge a battery. I adjusted my charger accordingly, touched wires to the terminals (which is actually pretty dangerous, by the way), and waited for something to melt or explode. Nothing did, so I taped them in place and left them for awhile.

After some time, I made sure nothing smelled like smoke, took the wires off, and plugged the battery back in. I prayed to whatever arsehole force had thrown me into this situation to at least let this one thing work, and turned the laptop on.

The screen lit up.

“It’s alive! Alive!” I shouted, tears in my eyes. I cannot describe the sudden, crushing relief that washed through me as that screen came on. It’s stupid, I know; I was on a fucking spaceship, surrounded by sophisticated future technology (even if said technology was somewhat dilapidated), but all I cared about was this dinky little years-old laptop. But the laptop and the phone were all I had of Earth, and the phone was charged through the laptop. Everything else had long ago been destroyed, or had recently been launched into space. When they broke, that would be it. I didn’t know how to fix them.

My hands trembled as I logged in and checked that everything was there. Even with my nonexistent computer skills, I knew there was no reason something wouldn’t be there, but I checked anyway. I plugged my phone in, checked that it was charging, and went to stow everything safely away in my ring.

I needed a more reliable way to store my information. I needed to put it on something that could actually be maintained or fixed. This was a more difficult problem than you might think; it’s not like I could just copy-paste files over onto the Stardancer’s computers. I didn’t know how computer programming worked, but I was pretty sure that alien computers wouldn’t be able to read a fucking pdf.

There were a couple of programming books in my vast stolen collection. A quick glance at them told me that I had absolutely no hope of learning enough to even figure out what I’d need to do to make the files compatible, let alone actually be able to do it, but maybe I could somehow find a way to translate it so that one of the more tech-minded drakes could do it for me. This thought was in the forefront of my mind as I headed off to learn more about the computer systems with Kerlin.

Kerlin was a little more difficult to talk to since the space laser battle. He’s lost a wing and one of his forelegs didn’t work too great, which meant some adjustment needed to be made to our shared language. This wasn’t difficult in concept – speech impairment wasn’t exactly new to either human or drake societies, and he could still read my gestures just fine – but we lost a bit of potential for subtlety in communication.

“How have you been, Kerlin?” I asked him as I leapt toward his station in the low gravity of the bridge.

“We’ve finished altering our navigation and balance systems to compensate for the missing half of the ship,” he said excitedly. “The mathematics are really complicated with only one set of rotational crossbars to – ”

“Wow, that fun, huh? Your job sounds absolutely fascinating, I bet everyone’s really jealous. Say, you guys have to deal with a lot of different species, right? I bet you occasionally get electronic information from all over the place.”

“Sometimes, yes. This ship is an aljik ship and we don’t really need to run any non-aljik software other than what we design on the fly. Designing such software is a very difficult task, very few people can do it.”

“But you can.”

“Yes.”

“So if I had a bunch of foreign data that I needed to store and access somewhere, you’d be able to do it?”

Kerlin’s remaining wing drooped in suspicion. “What do you need stored?”

“Nothing much. You know all my engineering texts?”

“Oh! You’re looking to store them somewhere more reliable. Can’t be done.”

“Are you sure?”

“Just because I can write aljik-compatible code doesn’t mean I can decipher a completely alien method of programming, pull it apart, and rewrite it in aljik. Do you have any idea how complicated that would be?”

“Nope, not a clue.”

“Too complicated. Can’t be done, not by this crew.”

“Fuck. Okay. Let’s get to work, then.”

We got to work. Learning to use the computer system was very boring. I was starting to get somewhat disillusioned with my escape plan; it had been ludicrous before the ship had been cut in half, and I wasn’t any closer to finding out how to find Earth, so the whole thing was probably pointless anyway. I also hadn’t even started considering how to get an escape pod to Earth with me still alive inside it, even if I could find Earth and program one to take me there. There was just no way I’d be able to fill it with the food, air and fuel I’d need; that was obvious even without knowing where I was. Stealing the Stardancer itself wasn’t even worth considering in its current condition, even if I somehow was capable of overpowering the whole crew; it was a multi-person round-the-clock effort to keep it livable. And what would I even do with the crew in that situation? I wasn’t about to leave them in space to die.

Besides, the ship could be attacked again. The only thing that would be more annoying than dying for being between the Queen and the Princess would be dying for being alone in a ship mistakenly thought to still contain said Princess.

I did my best to pay attention anyway. It wasn’t easy. We’d put a lot of work into our shared language but there were some things that we still didn’t have terms for, and our thought processes were too different to easily infer meaning from metaphors.

“Why couldn’t I have ended up in Adams’ universe and got a babel fish,” I muttered to myself, half in English and half in our interspecies pidgin.

“A what?” Kerlin asked.

“It’s a… translator, from a text,” I said.

“Ceramic has some of those. We could go and find him?”

He thought I meant dictionaries. “No, it’s a creature. A...” I search for some sort of analogue for ‘fiction’. “A false creature. A creature that is not there.”

Kerlin gave me a puzzled look.

“It’s… hey, Glath!” I flagged Glath down as he passed. “You got a minute?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the drake term for ‘fiction’?”

“You mean deceit? Lying?” Glath shifted into a drake shape and showed me the gesture.

“No, not lying. Fiction.”

“I don’t really understand the difference.”

I blinked at him. “You don’t have fiction? Pretend stories?”

“Well, yes. A lot of the higher castes practice occasional deceit.”

“No, not… I mean, made up stories where everybody knows they’re made up.”

Glath wavered uncertainly. “You mean when people design a lie together to deceive a third party?”

“No, I don’t mean that!”

“Ah. Hmm. Young Princesses might engage in transparent deceit to practice their skills for their eventual regency fight.”

“Are you serious? Aljik don’t have fiction?” I glanced at Kerlin. “Can you ask Kerlin if drakes do?”

“I’m not sure I understand the concept well enough to communicate it, but I’ll try.”

The pair had a long, involved conversation that I couldn’t really follow. Occasionally, Glath asked me a question about fiction. I answered as best I could. The pair looked more confused and incredulous as the conversation went on.

Eventually, Kerlin turned to me. “Humans have… pretend lying?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Double lying?”

“No, it’s honest. Because everyone knows it’s fake, see? We use it to communicate deeper truths.”

“You lie until it is true again?”

“No, we… use a false framework to...” I hesitated. Even if I’d known what I wanted to say, I didn’t have the words for it. I switched to English. “Glath, can you translate, please? It’s like… there are social and cultural norms and values that we pass on through stories. Little kids learn about what their culture values and why through the stories, and they also learn how to communicate by telling them. But it’s more than that. It’s like… okay, ending up here on the Stardancer was just so totally outside anything my life had prepared me to deal with, right? I didn’t even believe in aliens. But I still had some idea what to do, because we run scenarios like this through fiction. We tell each other stories where all kinds of things, probable or improbable, possible or impossible, happen, and with that we open each others’ minds to their possibilities. I had a concept of aliens from our fiction, I had a vague idea of different strategies to communicate depending on what sort of people you turned out to be from our fiction. Even if you had’ve been something completely outside human conception, the stories we have still would’ve equipped me better for figuring out what was going on that relying on mere experience would have. And fiction builds our future. When we develop new technologies or go new places, it’s usually because somebody dreamed of an improbable future and wrote it into our fiction. We… test things in our minds first, see? Not just simulations of what we think will happen next, but stories of things that could never happen, because we weave meaningful stories inside them that can be translated to the real world. It teaches us how logic works and how people work, and gives us templates to strive for when deciding what sort of person we want to be. It’s...” I shrugged. “It’s just how our culture is built. Human culture simply wouldn’t exist without it.”

Glath finished translating. He and Kerlin stared at me.

“I still don’t understand,” Kerlin said.

“Okay,” I sighed. “Let’s try an example.” I thought frantically for a story close enough to the crew’s life experience for them to relate to. Found something. It’d have to do.

“Let me tell you about the crew of the Starship Enterprise.”

* * *

And thus began the Game of Lies.

Charlie, using Ceramic to translate, explained the concept of fiction to me. I didn’t entirely understand it, but when she began laying out the false history of the Starship Enterprise, I couldn’t help but be drawn in. She encouraged me to try the process of fictional storytelling myself. I wasn’t very good.

It wasn’t long before other crewmates joined in. Soon, we had a game of it. The game was simple – players would take turns to tell a story, and everyone else had to guess whether or not it was fiction. Any who could guess correctly gained a point. The storyteller received a point for every listener they deceived. Most of us lost track of our points quickly, but it didn’t matter.

I expected Charlie to win the game easily, but she turned out to be fairly evenly matched with the rest of us. Communication barriers erased a lot of natural advantages, and she had no more idea of what was a normal, believable situation for a drake or aljik than we had any idea what was a normal, believable situation for a human. She expressed a lot of confusion over the ‘structure’ of some of our stories, but refused to explain what this meant.

“I’ll get into it later, when you’re more comfortable with storytelling,” she said.

I learned a lot about humans from the Game of Lies. A lot about aljik, too. I daresay Charlie and the aljik learned a lot about us. Yarrow and I quickly got into a competition to see who could tell the most outrageously obvious lies and still fool Charlie and the aljik, but we had to tone it down as they got better and better at picking up little inconsistencies in the scenarios that we invented.

Ceramic was almost impossible to fool. He could deduce deception from body language. Only Yarrow managed to fool him with any regularity. (“The secret,” Yarrow explained to me, borrowing a phrase from Charlie, “is to not give a fuck.”)

The faceless Captain joined us occasionally. She was an extremely good deceiver, but had difficulty detecting fiction told by non-aljik. She didn’t have time to get as much practice as most of us, having a lot of ship systems to manage and monitor near-constantly. She tended to request Starship Enterprise stories from Charlie. (Although we all knew these to be fiction already, Charlie frequently caved to popular demand and told them, although she always told us that it had been a long time since she’d heard the stories and might be wrong in a few details. Why this mattered when the story was already false, I didn’t know.) When Charlie was listening to other people’s stories, she took notes. She shrugged when I asked her what they were for.

“Just learning,” she said.

“What can you learn from lies?” I asked, puzzled.

“About a third of the stories told here are true. But actually, you can learn a lot. I used to work as a copy editor – someone who had to fix up people’s stories before they were, uh, put into texts. You can tell a lot about someone from how they tell a story. For example, most of the drake tell stories that take place on planets. Yours are more daring and optimistic, Yarrow’s are very conservative and full of calculations, Dairan’s are fatalistic, but they always take place on planets and talk about ground territories around core trees. These core trees are important?”

“They’re central to the future of our species.”

“Why are you in space?”

“What do you mean?”

“It seems like everything you guys think is important happens on the ground. Why are you in space?”

“We are looking for a new planet to plant new core trees and set up a new society.”

“Hmm.” She took down some notes. “Surely there were safer ways to do that than join a very wanted pirate ship?”

“It was a… complicated situation.” I dipped my wing with the term ‘complicated’, indicating a disinclination to explain further. Charlie raised her eyebrows, but didn’t press the issue.

The human’s fears aside, we knew what we were doing. We were safe. For now.

* * *

We were being followed.

Back before the regency fight, when I was one of four Princesses ready to fight for Anta’s legacy, back when I had a name and a face, back before I was trying to hold a single pirate ship together on the edges of a stolen territory, my sisters and I used to practice stalking a lot. We practiced a lot of combat skills, for obvious reasons. Even the shyr, born to take down enemies from the shadows, admired my skills. The one thing I was better at than stalking someone was knowing when I was being stalked.

I had checked the proximity detection systems of the Stardancer over and over for several crests. The systems were damaged, clumsy, and had been weak to begin with, but I was certain of the results. I could feel it. We were being stalked.

My ship, my crew, was changing under me. I wasn’t worried about it. Bringing a new species aboard usually alters the dynamic somewhat, and the human had, if anything, helped the crew work together more efficiently. It was chaotic and messy, yes; but I, like Anta before me, was an expert at leveraging chaos. The crew didn’t bother me. The persistent blip on the edge of our radar, barely distinguishable from the normal noise expected from poorly functioning equipment, did.

I couldn’t see what it was. It wasn’t attacking. I had noticed it eight crests ago, but that didn’t mean it had started following us eight crests ago. It had to be tracking us; there was no other reason for it to be there, hiding but not attacking. It might be waiting for something to fail so it could swoop in and attack. It might be a military scout, tagging our position while it waited for reinforcements. It might be a defector, looking for a place in my ranks but unable to summon the courage to approach. The rogue Queen had to know about the human by now; perhaps a defector was afraid of that.

I didn’t have anything to send out and check. There were still some escape pods attached to the ship but they weren’t fast enough to chase down our pursuer, who would flee as soon as they were spotted.

Heading over to have a look in the Stardancer itself wasn’t an option. The current Stardancer hadn’t been built for quick flight even when it was intact, and now it could barely limp. I certainly wasn’t initiating a dash in it until I absolutely had to; we couldn’t trust the shielding. Eventually, for my plan to take over the Empire to work, I was going to have to initiate a truly dangerous dash… but hopefully we’d have time to capture another ship, or make our current one safer, before that happened. I certainly wasn’t going to zoom about for no good reason and take stupid chances.

The pursuer was probably military. That meant that it was reasonable to assume that the Faceless Queen knew our position. She also probably knew that we had at least one human aboard. And in our last encounter, her soldiers had definitely been shooting with the intention of killing in the field, which meant that things had reached the point where she no longer cared about preserving the little piece of insurance I’d taken with me when I’d fled.

Things were coming to a head. Every moment we waited was a moment risking death. Very soon, ready or not, I was going to have to put the plan into motion and take control of the Empire.

I really, really hoped that we’d be ready in time.

* * *

So transferring those pdfs from my laptop to the Stardancer’s computers turned out to be incredibly easy. Time-consuming, but easy. I almost collapsed in awe of my own profound stupidity when I figured out what I needed to do. There was no need to fuck around with bullshit like programming protocols and file types at all.

The Stardancer has aljik display screens. It also has aljik-built cameras. I just took a photo of each page of each pdf, had Kerlin show me how to turn them into a single document, and put the photos in the ship’s main computer. Sure, I didn’t have search functions or anything in the new documents, but who cares? They were backups for if my laptop died. They were better than nothing.

Aljik screens transmit in all kinds of colours I can’t see, but they also transmit in my entire visual range, so that didn’t matter. My phone and laptop, like all LCD colour screens, only show three colours, which give the illusion of a spectrum of colour because of how human eyes work. According to Kerlin, the Stardancer’s screens transmit in what I guess we would consider an analogue colour system; whatever wavelength goes into the camera comes out on the display screen. Kerlin spent about an hour ranting about how this was a terrible system because of something to do with resolution loss that I didn’t care about; all that mattered to me was that the aljik display physically replicated my laptop screen display, so (except for a resolution loss so tiny I couldn’t even notice it) I could see exactly the same image on both with my poor, limited human eyes.

It took a really long time. I took photos whenever I had spare time, which was becoming more plentiful as we caught up on Stardancer repairs. Although much of the ship had become addicted to the concept of storytelling, so the Game of Lies (I didn’t pick the name) was also quite a time sink. A very informative time sink.

I made some cards and taught the ketestri how to play poker. It won every time.

It was nearly two weeks (by my best reckoning) after I fixed my laptop before I remembered the four-hour mystery video on my phone. I watched it. It was neither mysterious, nor particularly interesting; back when I’d spotted the military ship in space, I’d used a lens screwed over the phone’s camera to magnify my view of the ship. I’d taken video too, because why not?

Apparently I’d just forgotten to actually stop the video in our panicked dash to get back inside the ship. It had recorded for four hours before automatically stopping and saving; some kind of low memory feature on the phone. The phone sits in my toolbelt with the camera facing forward, so what I had was mostly waist-high footage of the start of the dramatic battle, followed by me getting eaten by the ketestri and 3 and a half hours of darkness where the camera was buried in ketestri slime. With the sound dulled by the phone’s protective plastic and its waist-high angle, it wasn’t exactly quality footage. I kept it anyway. It was the last recorded image of some of my now-dead crewmates.

It was also actual proof that all that weird shit had happened and I was somehow not dead. I still couldn’t quite understand how that could be true. I idly watched the start of the video again. Partway through the part where everyone was freaking out on the bridge, I paused the video, heart in my throat, and rewound a little. I watched about three seconds of video. Rewound. Watched them again.

“Fucking hell,” I breathed.

I watched them again.

We’d been on the bridge. The computer drakes were checking systems and preparing for battle. I hadn’t been paying them any attention, but I’d happened to be standing at an angle that put several computer screens in the camera’s view, and while neither my eyes nor my camera were able to pick up everything on the computer displays, I’d spent an awful lot of time with Kerlin learning to identify things from what I could see.

The display closest to me showed, for just a few seconds, a star map. Our position was marked on the map. So were several other things. We were a little blue dot, and I knew enough of aljik colour protocols to know that the pale green dots and lines underlying the map were Empire activity. I couldn’t distinguish the colours for military activity and other activity, but that didn’t matter. I could see what I needed to see.

Our position was on the map. Pale green was all over the damned map, except for a big circle near one edge that showed nothing but total blackness and a single pale green line heading to a single location inside the circle and nowhere else. It was the only thing like it anywhere on the map.

The quarantine zone of Earth. Had to be.

The green line puzzled me for a bit, until I realised that it was probably somebody going in to routinely check on the Jupiterians and make sure they weren’t fucking with Earth. Glath’s dictionaries had come from a Jupiterian trying to do exactly that, after all. I didn’t give a shit about what the Jupiterians were doing or what the Empire’s policy on them was; all I cared about was that I had an image – not a great image, but an image – showing our location, and the location of Earth.

We had moved a little since the fight, of course, but not dramatically. We couldn’t risk dashing about at superlight speeds in the wreck of the Stardancer. Now that most of the critical life support systems were as stable as we could get them, Tyzyth and I were scheduled to start work on getting the dash shielding to a non-suicidal state of repair, and then we’d leave the area as quickly as we could. Meaning that I had until we repaired the shielding or until we were attacked again, whichever came first, to come up with a plan. My map would be valid for that long.

I had a map!

What the fuck was I supposed to do with it?


	21. Anticipation

The first thing I figured I should do was find out how far away from home I was. This turned out to be a lot harder than you’d think. For one thing, the map was pretty zoomed out, and I hadn’t been intending to film it at all so I didn’t have the clearest shot. The star maps could be zoomed in on, but the three seconds of footage I had wasn’t. For another, the map wasn’t built with the assumption that people would be using the stars to navigate; the stars were background terrain behind Empire-built landmarks, most of which I couldn’t make out with my human eyes. All in all, something as simple as picking out individual stars under the haze of green lines was a trial.

It also didn’t help that my view was 2-dimensional. The maps can be rotated, but again, all I had was a few seconds of camera image of a stationary one; the drake at the computer was checking the route for something called a ‘green dash’, which apparently didn’t require much detailed map examination. The image had no depth, meaning that it wasn’t actually possible to tell how far apart the stars were in 3D space. I decided to give it a go anyway, even though the margin of error would make my estimate pointless. I counted the stars in the little exclusion zone, checked my textbooks to get an idea of how far apart starts were, and used that to estimate a scale for the map and measure our distance to the centre of the exclusion zone.

It turned out not to matter how rough my estimate was, because even the most optimistic possible estimate was “far too fucking far away”. My estimate put us somewhere between 100 and 150 light years from Earth. And it was probably a major underestimation.

I reflected on this. It shouldn’t really surprise me. Stars are really, really far apart. The closest star to the Earth is of course Sol, which is 8 light minutes away, but the second closest is Alpha Centauri A at 4.22 light years away. The mere fact that so many stars were on the map should’ve tipped me off to the insane distances involved.

To get home, I was definitely going to have to commandeer a ship that could travel beyond the speed of light. And I was going to have to figure out how to pilot such a ship. Our escape pods couldn’t do that; they could get insanely fast by human standards and had an awful lot of maneuvring fuel, but their capabilities were negligible on the scale I’d need. And the Stardancer was in too bad a shape to do it. We couldn’t dash safely until Tyzyth and I fixed all the shielding, which we didn’t really have the materials to do, and the moment we did initiate a dash, I’d be lost again. That meant that unless I was willing to go back to square one and have to find a way to figure out where I was all over again, my window for taking over the Stardancer and making my escape was the length of time between when the shielding was repaired, and when Captain Nemo decided to get us out of this incredibly dangerous war zone.

That probably wasn’t going to be very long. I could delay repairing the shielding, invent all kinds of problems and slip-ups, but that just increased our chances of all dying via another giant fucking space laser.

Fuck. What was the smart move here? Turn my back on the map? Try something else later? I didn’t know if there would be a later. I’d very almost died so many times on the Stardancer already. If I tried to play it safe, I’d just be extending my stay on the ship, putting myself in more danger.

No, I had to repair the shielding as fast as possible, and I had to try to come up with a plan to take over the ship as soon as it was done. A ship I didn’t know how to control, that needed multiple people on the controls… shit. Could it even be piloted by someone who wasn’t an aljik Princess? None of the other aljik looked big enough to wire themselves into Captain Nemo’s station. But it used to be a prison, and somebody would have had to fly it when it was a prison, so there had to be a way.

And what the hell was I going to do with my crewmates, even if I figured out how to fly the ship? They’d definitely try to stop me. Being brought to Earth was like a nightmare scenario for them, based on what they knew of humanity. I didn’t want to hurt them, though. If I abandoned them in space they’d die, and I couldn’t exactly bring them with me to Earth. I’d seen enough scifi movies to know how badly that was likely to go.

I looked at the footage of the map again. I didn’t know the drake who had brought it up to look at for a few seconds. I still didn’t know everyone in the crew.

“What are you watching?” Glath asked. I jumped. I hadn’t heard him come into my ring. The entrance shafts lining up isn’t exactly a silent process; I should probably pay more attention to my surroundings.

“Video of the space laser fight,” I told him, unpausing the video and handing him the phone. “I took it by accident.”

Glath was wearing his human form, and took the phone from me. He seemed to be able to hold things mush easier with human hands than aljik claws. His spiders behaved better, holding their shape. I’d always thought of human hands as being pretty complicated, but I supposed that claws must be more so, no matter how simple they looked.

“Some of these people are dead now,” he said morosely.

“Yeah.” There wasn’t much else to say. “Glath, what the fuck are we doing out here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, right now we’re repairing our ship and trying to survive, but… big picture. Are we just gonna hover on the edge of the law until our luck runs out and we die? Our captain’s a rebel Princess space pirate fleeing the wrath of her sister, the ruler of the Empire. Her choices are take the Empire or die, right? Is there a plan here? We can’t just push our luck trying to hide forever.”

“I am sure that the captain has a plan.”

“Really? Because I’m getting sick of almost dying. She’s going to run out of attendants eventually. No matter how many strays like me she picks up, what happens when she runs out of aljik? Will anyone listen to her then?”

“She is a Princess.”

“An aljik Princess. Stop thinking like an aljik for five minutes.”

Glath shrugged and handed my phone back. “I wouldn’t worry. The Faceless Princess is excellent at making plans.”

“Do you know what the plan is?”

“Of course not.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“If I knew, how could she be sure that I wouldn’t tell the Faceless Queen?”

I blinked. “Are you suggesting out Captain doesn’t trust you?”

“She cannot afford to trust anyone.”

“Ever?”

“Not until her role as the Queen is secure. Once there are no more competitors, there will be nobody to betray her to.”

“So she’s gonna play secrets until the moment we’re out of danger.”

“Yes.”

I slipped my phone into my belt, thinking of just how far away from home I was. I thought about the state of our ship. I thought about the forces that Glath apparently had confidence our Captain could overcome, but had no idea how she planned to do it.

“We’re all going to die, aren’t we,” I said thoughtfully.

* * *

Here’s a fun story for the Game: once upon a time, there was a young drake named Yarrow. Everybody thought Yarrow was very intelligent, and that they would use that intelligence to be very successful. But then Yarrow proved themselves to be an absolute fucking idiot by getting caught up in some idiot recolonisation adventure, tempted by the thought of settling on a fresh, new planet. Shortly afterward, Yarrow, along with all the other absolute morons who decided to tag along with the Stardancer, died uneventfully in space and nobody remembered.

The moral of the story is ‘I am a fucking idiot’, and it’s a winner because whether it’s fiction or not depends on whether it’s told now or later. I am definitely going to die out here. We all are.

The itching in my scales is getting pretty persistent, now. It’s no longer possible to ignore it. Some of them have started falling off on their own, which I wasn’t expecting to happen. I’ve started avoiding everyone and everything when I can, determined not to brush up against anything and lose scales.

I’m not sick, and it’s not dangerous. I’m just pushing my body beyond what it’s built for. We’re not supposed to go this long before maturing, and my body’s moving on without me. I admit, at this point I’m just being stubborn. I must be the youngest drake on the ship by now. I’m not the only male left – not by a long shot – but everyone else has given in and lost at least a couple of layers of scales. Me, I’m refusing to give in to physics. Call it a coping mechanism. If we actually do make it to a new planet, I’m going to have quite the reproductive advantage.

Two of our team have matured completely into females now, their claws growing in and their gullets heavy with core seeds. They have quite a while still before the seeds die if they aren’t planted, but still, our time to find a livable planet is limited. There are several within dash distance, but we can’t dash safely without shielding. Besides, the aljik would definitely kill us for the betrayal if we crashed the Stardancer into a planet and stranded them.

I don’t have a plan for getting through this. I’m starting to think that nobody does.

* * *

Nelan ran one last inspection on his new communications system. The Rainbow Destroyer had been even more badly damaged in the fight than he had initially suspected, and it had taken a lot of work to rig up even the primitive system he’d managed. There was no way he could get a signal to the heart planet with it; it was too far away. The navigation system was too much of a mess to aim a signal that accurately, and he had no way of calculating the star masses between them to correct for gravitational deflection. But he could reach an outpost, probably.

Probably.

Nelan composed a status report, and sent it.

* * *

“Okay,” I told Tyzyth as I handed him a lens, “explain it to me again. How fucked are we?”

“Pretty fucked,” he said, barely looking up from the delicate mechanism he was examining. “We just don’t have enough shielding for the whole ship.”

“How is that possible? We didn’t lose any. I mean, we lost half a ship, shielding with it, but the half we still has has all the shielding that came with it. It’s just cracked all to hell. We can seal it back up.”

“The composite is a medium to propogate a shielding field for dashing. The field is generated by the eight field engines in the inertial crossbars of the ship. The thing with fields is, they get weaker the further you move from the source, and the propogation medium only does so much on that front. So the shielding is pretty strong around the ends of the ship but pretty weak in the middle.”

“That sounds like a pretty big design flaw, being that the middle is where all the controls are.”

“It’s not usually a problem. There are field engines at either end of the ship; their fields overlap in the middle. It’s easily enough for a blue dash even if an engine or two goes out, because the shielding from both sides of the ship is additive. Not great for a green dash, but really, nothing is going to protect you properly from a green dash.”

“But we lost four of those engines when the ship was cut in half.”

“Exactly. The strength of the field generated by the other four, by the time it gets to the control ring, is… risky. And we don’t have the resources or expertise to manufacture new engines.”

“Can’t we just move the ones we have closer to the middle of the ship?”

“We can’t just stick them on the hull. They need to be a safe distance from other shipboard machinery.”

“We can move the inertial crossbars. We’d lose a lot of control over the ship’s rotation, but that’s a less severe problem. We can use rockets for that; we’d be limited by fuel but – ”

“Moving the crossbars would require a stardock, and a lot of tools and helping hands that we don’t have. It’s impossible out here.”

“Hmm.” I thought about this. “Do they need to be on the crossbars, specifically, or just within a certain distance?”

“They need to be at the right distance. And have the shielding composite connecting them to the space you want to shield. Why? What are you thinking?”

“Can we coat cables or something with the shielding composite?”

“Not easily, but it’s doable. Why?”

“Well, we still have some escape pods. Not enough to go tossing them away, but… couldn’t we put an engine in each, have people pilot them around the ship at the correct range, over the control ring, and connect them to the hull with composite-coated cables? Do we have pilots good enough to pull that off?”

“Hmm. That might work. It’d leave the filtration area with insufficient shielding, but...”

“But if we have to pick what to shield, the ship’s controls are more important.”

“The end of the ship doesn’t just have the filtration system. It has a lot of storage and fine maneuvring engines. We’ll have to move those closer to the centre of the ship. It can be done. The ship’ll be really cramped, but it can be done.”

“Great. You wanna run this by Captain Nemo, or should I?”

“I will. Don’t you have a thing with Kerlin?”

“Oh right, more ship control lessons! Hooray!”

* * *

“What’s a green dash?” I asked Kerlin, mostly to change the subject from computer instruction protocols.

“Where’d you hear that phrase?” he asked.

“People keep saying it. Everyone else seems to know what it means.”

“It’s an emergency form of faster-than-light travel. You’ve been through a few blue dashes. They’re safe, short-distance dashes. A green dash is a bit different.”

“How so?”

“Think of it as… think of a spaceship like a bit of elastic. You can toss the elastic to move it through space, but you get more power if you stretch it, store up some energy, and flick it. That’s a blue dash; you use a large amount of power all at once to fling the ship out in a chosen direction. You need to calculate the force and direction in advance to calculate where you want to go, and it puts a bit of strain on your elastic.”

“Okay...”

“A green dash is… more like you picked your destination, tied the other end of the elastic to said destination, and then let go.”

I winced. “Not safe, then?”

“Not at all. It has a lot of advantages – you pick your destination, not your direction, so it’s pretty precise so long as you’ve done your maths right. And the distance limit is defined only by the hardiness of your ship. But even the most well-shielded ship will take some pretty severe damage, and you’re almost guaranteed to lose at least some crew. That’s why it’s only ever used in a dire emergency.”

“Better than certain death, but still very probably death.”

“Yeah. Also, it leaves a… trail.”

“A trail?”

“We don’t have a shared word for it. Um… anyone with the right kind of sensor can see where you went from, and to, for quite some time. You can outrun someone with a blue dash, but a green dash tells anyone with a sensor exactly where you are. The Queen’s military, of course, have such sensors.”

“So if we ever used a green dash, we’d end up even more helpless than we are now, almost dead, and calling the military right to our location.”

“Exactly. The positive side of all of this is that if they green dashed to our location, their ships would be pretty badly damaged too, but they could send as many as they wanted. We’d be overwhelmed.”

“So it’s useless unless we had some kind of defensive base to go to. And I’m guessing that we don’t.”

“Correct. There are multiple safe ports we can drop into, but they wouldn’t be safe any more if we brought the military in our wake. They’d be easily overrun.”

So the green dash was practically useless to us. It could turn ‘imminent death’ into ‘probably imminent death, and if not, then slightly delayed death’. But if we solved the shielding problem, we could blue dash away from our last known location and find our way to a port or something. Resupply. Get a new ship. Whatever space pirates did in this situation.

It all came down to the shielding. I hoped the captain would accept our plan for moving the engines.

I hoped it would work.

* * *

“Absolutely not,” I said.

Tyzyth shifted nervously. “But Princess, it’s the only way. We simply don’t have the resources to shield the control ring with the engines placed as they are.”

“If I understand your explanation correctly, there is a good chance that the shields would not work at all if we try this, yes? It’s never been done before.”

“It has a chance of working, Princess. The system we have now has no chance of working.”

“It has no chance of protecting the control ring,” I corrected. I pondered the situation. “Fix the shielding as best you can and get back to me on exactly how much of the ship the current shield engines can safely protect,” I said. “I need solid numbers. When we have that data, we’ll move everyone’s environmental areas into that zone, even if we have to share rings between species.”

Tyzyth stared. “You’re going to write off the control ring?”

“If we have to, yes.”

“But there’d be no way to control the – !”

“You have your job, Tyzyth.”

“… Yes, Princess.”

“Oh. And I need to know how much of the ship we can expect to keep intact in the event of a green dash, too.”

“A green dash would be suicide at this point in time.”

“Do whatever you have to do to change that. Use whatever resources you need. Sacrifice crew if you have to. Give me an intact zone for a green dash, then build a door at the end of that zone so that we won’t lose air in it if the rest of the ship is torn away.”

“Princess, that… that’s...”

“Your job. Do it.” I didn’t wait for a reply. I settled back into my control seat, filaments automatically wiring me into the neural interface of the ship’s computer. I put out the orders immediately.

I: All remaining escape pods bar two to be docked at pod ring C, behind the filtration area. Two escape pods to be left at pod ring A, around the control ring. In the event of an evacuation, these will be used solely to relieve congestion on the entrance shaft by moving crew straight to pod ring C.

II: Control rings shifts are hereforth immediately rescheduled to minimise necessary control ring staff at all times and minimise congestion in case of an evacuation.

III: All environmental rings prepare for relocation upon pending engineering data.

IV: Evacuation point changed to ship’s filtration area. Crew advised to be as close to the shield engines as possible in the event of an evacuation.

V: No ordered dashes are to be initiated immediately. Any dashes are to be put on a timer, that the crew has time to reach the evacuation zone before the dash initiates. Dash preparation now triggers a shipwide alarm.

VI: In the event that the dash alarm is triggered, all crew are to immediately evacuate to the evacuation zone.

That would do for now. Now, it was a matter of waiting on Tyzyth.

I was getting more and more certain that whatever was following us was military. It was only a matter of time before forces mustered in the area for a final attack.

We had no choice but to wait for that attack.

This was going to be it. The final stage of my grand plan. Soon, the Empire would have an undisputed ruler. Me, or her.

Soon, it would all be over.

* * *

Queen Tatik read the latest military report. She read it again.

The signal from the Rainbow Destroyer had been intermittent and snowy, the date that the outpost received being barely decipherable. But there was enough in there. Enough to deduce the general state of the Rainbow Destroyer, and the Stardancer. It was exactly what she’d wanted to hear.

It might still be a trap, of course. The signal contained almost none of the verification codes to confirm its source. This wasn’t suspicious, given how unreliable the signal itself was and the fact that it was apparently sent by an engineer who probably didn’t know them, but it did mean that it could very well be faked. She might be sending her forces into a trap, if she acted on it.

Tatik was a cautious ruler. It kept her Empire stable. But caution only went so far. At some point, she was going to have to make the final decision, enact the killing blow. If she didn’t take this chance now, then… when? She couldn’t keep waiting for the perfect chance forever. This was the perfect chance.

Tatik mobilised her military.

Soon, it would all be over.

* * *

It had been a long, exhausting day. Captain Nemo had rejected our little escape-pod-engine-tether plan for being too risky and had instead instituted a plan that sounded even riskier to me, but at least it saved us a lot of labour. My immediate tasks were to glue up a bunch of cracks in the shielding and then help Tyzyth install an airlock in the central corridor, once he figured out exactly where it needed to go, to be the new back of our ship if a dash tore off the rest. That could wait until after I’d had some sleep.

I had some dinner, lost another couple of poker games against the ketestri and settled back onto one of its tentacles to sleep. The ketestri was good company, even if it beat me at everything and I hadn’t figured out how to talk to it yet. I laid back and looked again, out of habit, at the few seconds of video of a star map I had. The few seconds where a drake was confirming our emergency green dash path.

And noticed something. Something that was suddenly, blaringly obvious.

Suddenly, I had a plan. I knew what to do. It was going to be tricky, and dangerous, but it would work, I was sure of it; I could get home. I could get myself home, and I could save the crew of the Stardancer in the process; I could give them space to repair and recuperate, temporary shelter against the Empire, escape…

I forced myself to calm down. Looked at it from every angle, poked for any hole in my logic. It was solid. It would work. I could do it.

I was going home. I was going to save my friends in the process.

Soon, it would all be over.


	22. Plans

Follow my logic.

We had two systems of superlightspeed travel at our disposal. Neither could be used until we’d finished dealing with the shielding issue, but that was fine. Blue dashing we used quite often, to outrun things; it gave us little bursts of distance, and was fairly safe when the shields were working. Green dashing was dangerous and would bring the military right to us, so it was pretty useless as a flight mechanism unless things were really, really bad. The military could use it as much as they wanted if they were willing to put their ships at risk for the dash itself, because they had all kinds of safe places to zip to. But there was nowhere that we could go that they couldn’t follow.

There were two things that stood out to me on the map. The first was our current green dash location, which the drake had been checking. I mention it only because it was very, very stupid. Until this few seconds of video, I hadn’t had access to a map that let me deduce where Earth was, but I’d seen plenty of smaller starmaps and knew the location of some aljik landmarks relative to each other. If I was reading the map right, a green dash should currently take us to the heart planet of the Out-Western Aljik Empire. Right to the Faceless Queen’s doorstep. This seemed to me to be the worst possible destination in the entire galaxy, but hey, what do I know.

The other thing that stood out on the map was the place we should have set up as our green dash location. I’m sure you can already see where I’m going with this. If we initiated a green dash, we couldn’t stop them from seeing where we went. The safety was in going somewhere that they wouldn’t follow. We needed a location that would be perfectly safe for us to show up in in a trashed, defenceless spaceship, but that the military would see as far too dangerous to put their ships.

Captain Nemo didn’t have a location like that. But I did.

It was marked very clearly on the star map: a big, blank space almost completely devoid of aljik activity. The one place in the Empire that an entire Empire had been set up to stop people from going to.

Home.

The Stardancer had risked going there once, to pick me up, in the most desperate possible circumstances, and the crew had freaked out about it. The Empire, if I was interpreting the map right, very rarely sent someone to check on Jupiter and otherwise left it alone. I was pretty sure that nobody was going to risk a pitched space battle inside the quarantined zone, and the closer to Earth we got, the safer we’d be. We could wait, quiet, and repair what we needed, maybe trade resources with the Jupiterians if we had to, and then the Stardancer could try to blue dash around the cordon ships when they were ready. They’d be on their own for that, because my plan was to steal an escape pod and motor for home. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t dare follow me to Earth. One thing I’d learned from the Game of Lies was that the Stardancer crew, with the exception of Glath who had read all my books, had absolutely no understanding of the technological sophistication of Earth. ‘Humans get into spaceship and kill everyone’ was a realistic horror story to them. They didn’t know that it took us months or years to fling probes into space and didn’t seem to understand that our confinement to our own planet was a matter of technological limitation. I guess it made sense; to them, space travel was a simple matter and a lot of human advancements that I thought of as pretty mundane were amazing. Why wouldn’t somebody who could deduce the speed of universal expansion also be able to build an engine to traverse said universe? Why wouldn’t somebody who could selectively kill bacteria in the body with a simple injection also be able to put that body in space quite easily?

Anyway, I knew that so long as I didn’t do something really stupid like crash the Stardancer into Earth, humans posed absolutely no threat to the Stardancer, the Empire or anyone else. But the rest of my crew didn’t know that and, much more crucially, neither did the Empire.

I’d have to put us pretty close to Earth. The closer we were, the safer we were from pursuit, and besides, I wanted to be in the escape pod for the shortest time possible. I could still vividly recall watching that military ship blowing escape pods out of the sky. I wanted to be out and home before the crew could get themselves together enough to come after me. How was I going to edit our green dash path without anyone knowing? I… wasn’t entirely sure. But I had video footage of somebody checking the path, so maybe I could work from that. I just had to follow exactly what the drake did to get into the map, and then… figure out how to change it. And then, if we needed to dash, somehow stop anyone from noticing the destination change.

Okay, so I hadn’t thought out all the details. But it was still a pretty solid plan.

1: Change the green dash destination, somehow.

2: Fix the ship’s shielding.

3: Make sure I knew everything I needed to know about how to pilot an escape pod.

4: Figure out how to stop anyone from noticing the course change, somehow.

5: Wait for the military to show up and crush us.

Doable. A lot of hurdles, but doable. Surely.

I watched the few seconds of video over and over, memorised every movement of the drake’s tails, every interaction he had with the interface. I was going to have to replicate those movements, probably. And figure out the next step on my own. I couldn’t risk asking for help. I couldn’t risk anybody finding out what I was doing.

This was going to be tough.

* * *

There weren’t too many drake in the control ring. We were on a skeleton crew, to minimise congestion if we had to evacuate. It meant I should probably stop hanging around there myself, but we’d glued together the shielding composite as best we could and I was waiting on Tyzyth to do some tests and find out how much of the ship it could protect with our engines so we knew where in the central corridor to install an airlock; until that airlock was in place, we weren’t going to have enough space in the ‘safe’ part of the ship to evacuate everyone for a dash anyway. So until I got the results from Tyzyth, it didn’t really matter where I was, and I had nothing important to do.

Well, nothing ship-important to do. I had my own stuff to do.

I was loading up some new photos of my textbooks into the main computer on one of the many unused computer interfaces. It was kind of pointless to do so, given the unlikelihood of the system surviving the next military attack, but I needed an excuse to be at the console. I probably needn’t have bothered; nobody was paying me any attention whatsoever. As usual, people tended to assume that whatever I was doing was important and probably a part of my job, and working with a skeleton crew meant that not only were the handful of drakes present in the control ring spread pretty far apart, they were all really busy. Nobody notices as I took my display back to the home screen and flicked rapidly through a memorised sequence of menu selections through options I couldn’t read, and some of which I couldn’t even see.

There it was. The map. Much clearer than my image of it. I knew how to navigate a star map; I moved to the big blank area and zoomed in.

Yep, as I’d expected, only a single, thin, faded green line dipped in there, heading for the approximate centre of the zone. It was very pale, indicating a route rarely travelled. I zoomed in on the star it approached, and the planet it went to. That found Jupiter for me, and from Jupiter, it was very easy to find Earth. After a few seconds of thought, I decided to dump the Stardancer somewhere in the middle of the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. That would leave them well out of reach of humanity, and gave them the Jupiterians to trade with and Mars for resources (Jupiter was gaseous, but Mars had minerals much more familiar to us oxygen-breathing species). I didn’t actually know where Jupiter and Mars were on those orbits right now and the map didn’t tell me – the planets themselves weren’t marked, that would’ve been a pointless waste of computer power – but it was the best I could do. Now… how to change the green dash destination? There had to be a way.

I looked at my menu options again. I still couldn’t read them. I still couldn’t even see most of them. I poked at the screen a bit. I zoomed out again and tried to drag-and-drop the destination point from the heart planet to my solar system. Nope.

Dammit! I was so close! I was so –

“You need to move the destination anchor,” a voice said right behind me, very quietly, in English.

I spun guiltily, just in time to see Glath resolve into his human form. I swallowed my rising panic. “Glath!” I said. “I, uh… I was just, um… checking the, err...” I tried to back up, but there was a computer console in the way.

Glath reached out and grabbed my wrist. His grip was solid. I tried to break free; no luck. I was used to being able to push through him when I had to, but something had changed. He had no trouble holding onto his shape.

I considered calling for help, but… to whom? I was pretty clearly the traitor here.

Glath dragged my hand back to the console display, selected something from the menu, and moved my finger to the point I’d been trying to drag the dash location to. The little marker designating the dash location moved neatly over. He used my hand to quickly exit the screen, then let go.

I rubbed my wrist. “Why?” I asked.

“Everyone deserves a chance to have a home,” he said quietly.

I looked up into his eyes. They were different. He’d messed with his wings somehow so that the light moved differently on them. He wasn’t a solid black mass; there were white areas where his eyes should be, broken up by little black pupils, letting him ‘look at’ things. His human form was becoming more stable and realistic every day. Far more so, I realised, than his aljik form.

“Oh,” I breathed. “I… didn’t realise.”

He looked away.

“Don’t let them catch you,” he said quietly as he turned to leave. “They’ll kill you if they do.”

* * *

Here is a story that will never make it into the Game of Lies, because I am the only one who knows it, and I won’t tell.

Once upon a time, an Ambassador Colony was made. It was like any other Ambassador. Its colony grew, and it was educated, and it practiced its skills at imitation and demonstrated its knowledge of its purpose. It was named, as Ambassadors are, for the first object that it could replicate perfectly; a term that translates, roughly, to ‘Facsimile of a perfect ceramic bowl with a fine white rim’. It showed particular talent for shape. Colour was difficult for any newborn Ambassador, and the fact that it managed to include it was a point of pride. Like any Ambassador colony that survives initial growth and competence screening, it was told to go out into the universe, to be a part of the universe. Like any Ambassador, it did.

It found many wondrous things out there. It tried to be part of them. It was very, very difficult. There was no form that would fit, no world that felt like a home. Was this how it was supposed to feel? Ambassadors know from birth that they will never see their home; the physics of it would kill them instantly. An Ambassador goes home when it is ready to die. Was everywhere else supposed to feel like ‘making do’? Perhaps that was normal. There was nobody to ask.

In a universe of not-quite-right options, the Ambassador picked the least uncomfortable. It chose a form that it could replicate with relative ease, and that gave it freedom of movement and a comfortable lifestyle. It told itself that it had found itself. It didn’t have the vocabulary to voice any discomfort it felt. It didn’t have the life experience to recognise discomfort for what it was. Its job was to imitate and integrate. To itself, it imitated contentment.

But it kept searching, without acknowledging what it was doing. Perhaps without realising. It took missions that flung it far from the heart planet and that had it negotiating with Ambassadors who had chosen to emulate other races. It took every opportunity to search, to learn. It thought itself unnaturally curious, not desperate for a true identity.

When a Princess left with an insane plan she would not even properly explain, the Ambassador went with her. It went to a dangerous planet, then left again with a new companion. It learned who it was, over time. It began to appreciate what it had blithely turned its back on, leaving that planet as quickly as possible. It hadn’t known that it would be so important. It hadn’t known that it would be home.

At one point, the Ambassador had to choose between the people it thought it belonged with, and the person it now knew it belonged with. Everyone deserves a home.

The Ambassador knows that it probably won’t see Earth. It would be far too dangerous to go there; the entire point of the quarantine was to prevent humans from discovering exploitable life elsewhere in the universe. To go there would almost certainly get the Ambassador killed, and could very well endanger the entire Empire. But it thinks and dreams about impossible futures. In its mind, it builds a fictional future. This is a skill that it learned from its human companion.

This is a thing that humans do.

Humans help each other out, too. The Ambassador can help its human companion get home. If it can’t join her…

Well. Ambassadors are born knowing that they can never see their home. They only go home when they are ready to die.

* * *

I did the shield tests. They were a lot easier when Kakrt was still alive. Nothing against working with Charlie, but there are some things that human bodies can’t do, and Charlie lacked a lot of basic physics training, meaning I, poor beleaguered little Tyzyth, was doing the shield tests by myself. We could preserve the filtration area, and two environmental rings.

Two and a half rings, technically. But there’s not much you can do with half an environmental ring. Maybe the unshielded part of the hull would maintain integrity, maybe it wouldn’t. Besides, that half-unshielded ring contained two giant, slumbering kohrir; huge monsters that could punch through the hull if they wanted. They’d been there since the ship was a prison ship, because nobody dared to wake them up. Frankly, I wouldn’t lose any sleep if we had to dash and they got sucked out into space.

For now, there was an airlock to install. We hadn’t bothered to do this when the ship got cut in half; we didn’t have spare airlocks sitting around, so we had to make one, and it was pretty important to get pressure back in the central axle, so we’d just sealed off the cut-open end of the corridor. But we wanted our ship to maintain integrity through a dash with weak shielding, so this time we’d just have to take the time to build one. Airlocks are pretty simple. They’re two airtight doors with some system between them that lets you equalise pressure to either side. A proper airlock should be able to pump air in an out, to create the near-vacuum of space or the air pressure of the central axle, but we didn’t have spare pumps that were that powerful. We just put valves in, so that air could be let out into space or refilled from the ship slowly enough not to hurt the occupant.

It meant we’d lose an airlock’s worth of air every time it was used, but I didn’t think it would be used much outside of an emergency. We had a much better quality airlock on the other side of the ship if we needed to get in and out.

Anyway, Charlie and I built it out of spare hull material and valves, put it in place, and tested it, while the rest of the crew moved into the two ‘safe’ environmental rings. There was a lot of spare hull material around. Pretty much everything outside the shieldable area was essentially just scrap material the moment we tried to dash.

“Will all this stand up to a green dash?” Charlie asked as we installed the airlock.

“The Princess asked me the same thing,” I said. “Everyone talking about green dashing as if it’s a good idea is making me nervous.”

“Will it? If it happens?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?!”

“We don’t exactly have the equipment to run tests. If the hull is in good condition and our repairs to the shield medium left them conductive enough for the shield field, then yes. If not, no. I could estimate mathematically if the ship was new enough to be sure of the integrity of the materials, but we did get cut in half with a big laser. You might have forgotten.”

“When did you become so sarcastic, Tyzyth?”

“I have to work too closely with Yarrow these days. It’s catching.”

“I don’t think I’ve even seen Yarrow in weeks.”

“You’re not missing much. He’s gloomy and sour and avoiding everyone.”

“So he’s fine, then.” Charlie ran a hand over the new airlock. “Okay, ready for a pressure test.”

“One question,” I said. “How are we going to pressure test it? It equalises with valves. We can’t make it a vacuum because both sides still have air pressure. Unless we breach the seal we put in the corridor and put the unshielded part in a vacuum before we test, we can’t create the pressure difference.”

“Hmm. And at that point it’s not really a test, it’s just… standard operation.” Charlie tapped a finger against the wall thoughtfully. “The central corridor is pressurised to one aljik atmosphere, right?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the pressure in my ring, on that scale?”

“One point two atmospheres.”

“One-fifth higher. Not enough. I’d probably die. Hmm.”

“What do you mean? What are you thinking?”

“Oh, nothing dramatic.”

“You just said you were probably going to die.”

“Only if I’m an idiot. We have stored gases, right? What gases?”

“We don’t have words for – ”

Charlie whipped out her phone and brought up a picture. It was the table of different material units that she used to talk chemistry with Yarrow. “Gases made from what?”

I used the table to point out what we had. They were all pretty simple, mostly things made of two or three material units.

“Okay. Nitrogen. Uh, the one made of two of these joined together.” She tapped part of the table. “How much do we have that we could probably spare for a test?”

“Oh, we have plenty. Enough to fill the ship several times over, now that it’s so small.”

She nodded. “Show me where it is.”

* * *

My plan for testing the airlock was pretty simple. There were two doors, and I had to make sure that each could bear the strain of a pressure difference of one aljik atmosphere. Here’s the important part – it needed to bear a pressure difference of one aljik atmosphere. It didn’t need to bear an atmosphere against a vacuum. There was no need to pump the air out of the ‘space’ side when we could just increase the pressure on the ‘non-space’ side.

I decided to test one and a half atmospheres, because apparently I’m the only person on the stardancer who believes in silly things like redundancy and safety backups and soforth. A door that worked under normal conditions and only normal conditions didn’t sound too great to me.

Problem: apart from the ketestri, who was far too big to get in and help, the member of the crew who was best at working in high pressure environments was me. But my native atmospheric pressure was only one-fifth higher than an aljik atmosphere. For my test to work, I’d need to pressurise the ‘pressure’ side of the airlock to 2.5 aljik atmospheres. I wasn’t sure how much pressure a human could stand, but I was pretty sure it was a lot less than that. Sure, divers and stuff managed it, but I didn’t have a bunch of human survival equipment and emergency medical staff on hand.

If I needed to work in a very low-pressure environment, like the outside of the ship, I just wore my space suit, but I didn’t have anything that could protect me from a high pressure one.

So we’d have to run the test with nobody in the chamber.

This was a lot trickier to arrange than it sounds, because we’d need to open manual valves on the nitrogen tanks and the airlock doors. Evacuating the central corridor once everyone was settled into the new rings wasn’t hard; the Captain put out an order to keep it clear for the test, and it was clear for the test. But somebody – me – was going to have to be moving between fatally pressurising chambers, fucking with valves and shit.

Ever done that riddle about trying to get a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain across a river without any of the cargo hurting the other cargo? It was going to be a bit like that, except if I fucked up, I’d be drowning in my own blood while the life was literally squeezed out of me.

It’s also worth noting that I was literally betting my life on the integrity of the airlock. If the test failed, I’d probably die. But I was used to bullshit like that by now; without the test, it’d be the whole crew’s lives being bet on the airlock, not just one engineer.

I was pretty confident in the airlock’s integrity, anyway.

Pretty confident.

The first thing I did, once the central corridor was completely clear of all personnel except for my insane arse, was stick a contraption I’d made from scrap hull parts on the side of the corridor that would soon be in the vacuum of space. This contraption was basically a shark cage. I’d build it to hide in while the test was happening, so that if the airlock doors were launched at me at great speed, there was a chance I could avoid being crushed to death. Instead I’d probably be hurled into space as the safety cage tore through the end of the corridor we’d sealed off after the laser battle, which would at least be a cooler death.

I also put my full space suit on, with the helmet and fresh air supplies. I had a pretty good record for surviving in the vacuum of space. Maybe, even if I was launched through the wall, my luck would hold.

I’d had Tyzyth double-check my air pressure calculations to figure out how much nitrogen we would need. I was pretty confident I had the right amount. I dragged a couple of big tanks into the ‘pressure’ side of the corridor, the part that would hold atmosphere if we had to dash and the other side was torn to pieces. I opened the tank valves and raced for the airlock.

Aljik airlocks did at least bow to the most basic and primitive rules for any airlock, Thou Shalt Not Have Both Doors Open At Once You Fucking Moron, so I had to shut the first behind me and then rip open the second. This only took a few seconds as I didn’t have to equalise anything, but it felt like forever; I kept imagining that the pressure in the now-isolated chamber would slam the door into me, crushing me between the airlock doors. This was an exceedingly stupid thought; the tanks would take quite a while to empty and pressurise the chamber. Nevertheless, my hands shook as I made it through the second airlock door, sealed it behind me, and dashed for my safety cage.

I waited.

I’d left a small camera in the airlock so I could tell if the first door failed. The feed showed me… an airlock. I checked a timer on my phone. It would still be a while before the chamber was fully pressurised.

I cowered in my safety cage, not sure whether I should be bored or scared. Odds are, I was just gonna sit there doing nothing for awhile. But there was always a chance that I would be suddenly flung out into space by a couple of mobile metal doors zooming along the corridor.

I wasn’t. I waited until enough time had passed for the cabin to pressurise. Then I waited another half an hour. The first door could hold against a pressure differential of 1.5 aljik atmospheres, a little over 1atm in Earth measurements. Good for it.

Second door time.

I headed for the airlock and opened the valve between the outer door and the corridor I was in. I had a small bag of what was basically chalk dust which I held up to the hole. I wanted to see if there was air flow through the valve; if air moved from the airlock into my part of the corridor at this time, it meant that the tanks had pressurised the airlock, too, and that the inner door wasn’t airtight. No air movement. Good.

I closed the valve, climbed into the airlock long enough to open the inner door’s valve, then climbed right back out again, sealing the outer door behind me. Again, I dashed for my protective cage, and waited in a mixture of boredom and terror.

The airlock was pretty small, and should pressurise very quickly. After about five minutes I cautiously approached to make sure that no air was leaking through the closed valve, then retreated again. I left it for half an hour and proclaimed the airlock safe.

Here was the tricky part.

My situation, at this point, was thus: the ship had one airlock that led out into space. It was on the opposite side of the central corridor than me; the side that was now considered the ‘livable’ part of the ship. The only part of the ship on my side that was still in use was the control thing; everything that could be moved to the shielded part had been moved before the airlock test.

Between me and the shielded part of the ship stood an airlock and a corridor that were both pressurised to fatal levels. There was no simple way for me to depressurise either of them from my position. If we had a fully functional ship with a proper air regulation system, equalising the pressure would be a trivial issue from the control ring, but we’d lost most of those systems when the ship was cut in half, so I was going to have to use a more hands-on method.

I couldn’t depressurise just the airlock, either. The valve on the inner door was open; it was sharing pressure with the pressurised corridor. I had no way to close it without opening the outer door and blasting myself with a 1.25atm pressure differential.

Fortunately, I’d been learning from my mistakes and bothered to come up with a plan for this before starting the test. It was a bit complicated, but it should work. First, I opened all the ring shaft hatches in my part of the corridor; the ring shafts also act as airlocks between the central corridor and the various rings, remember. I couldn’t open both doors of them at once (this would be absurdly dangerous to allow given that they spin to match the environmental rings when you use them) so I couldn’t include the now-empty environmental rings in my plan, but I had access to the hatches themselves. The purpose of this was to maximise the volume of the space I was working in.

If I’d run the numbers right, the area I was now working in was about twice the size of the area of the pressurised corridor on the other side of the airlock. The area I was in was at one aljik atmosphere and the other area was at two and a half aljik atmospheres. If I just opened the valve on the outer airlock door, both areas would pressurise to one and a half aljik atmospheres, approximately. That was about 1.25 atm – about 25% higher pressure than my native air pressure. Could a human survive that? I had absolutely no idea. I certainly wasn’t about to find out.

I had a different plan. It was dangerous, but not ‘crushed to death by the air itself’ dangerous. It still involved opening the valve on the outer airlock door, so I did that.

And waited.

I watched my own suit carefully, bending my arm and screwing up my fingers. I watched how the fabric moved. I didn’t have a proper barometer with me to calculate air pressure, but my suit held 1atm of pressure – 1.2 aljik atmospheres. I waited until the fabric fell limp, then closed the valve again. Now, assuming my calculations were right, I was in 1.2 aljik atmospheres, and the pressurised side of the corridor should be in 2.1 aljik atmospheres. Pressure differential: 0.9 aljik atmospheres (0.75atm). Actually they were a little closer than that, because I’d been a bit slow with the valve. My suit was plastered to my skin. I had no way to estimate how far off target I was, but it didn’t seem to be hurting me, so probably not much. Now for the boring part. I dropped into a ring access shaft, closed the hatch behind me, and waited for the shaft to spin and match up with the environmental ring. This didn’t take long; none of the rings on my side of the ship were in use any more except the control ring, so they were only spinning very slowly to help provide a counterspin to the ones in use on the other side of the airlock. They were at the standard 1 aljik atmosphere, so the shaft depressurised to that before letting me in the ring. Then I went back to the central corridor, let the shaft repressurise from the air there, and did it again.

This was a very slow, very boring, very energy-consuming way to slowly pump air out of the central corridor. I wished we still had a functional ship with proper pressure valves for this. Maybe I shouldn’t have insisted on testing the airlock at all and just taken a chance on it without all this nonsense. When the corridor air reached the same pressure as the environmental ring, I switched to a different shaft; after a few more trips, it had lowered to about 1 aljik atmosphere. A bit more, technically, but the difference would be negligible. So I opened the airlock valve and repeated the process. It took 3 more cycles of this to distribute the extra air pressure across the environmental rings. Technically, there was no way to drop the pressure all the way to 1 aljik atmosphere with this method, but the environmental rings had a very high volume and the difference was negligible. After what felt like forever, I was able to move back through the airlock and report the success of my test. The corridor was still a fatal environment to anyone without a space suit – I’d used nitrogen for the test, so the carbon dioxide and oxygen levels were extremely low – but with the pressure back down, the primitive replacement air filtering system that Yarrow had whined about having to install would fix that over a couple of hours.

All that work over a probably-pointless airlock.

I couldn’t wait to break up the boredom by being found by the military.

* * *

“We have visual on the Rainbow Destroyer,” a tahl reported. “It… a lot of it appears to be missing.”

Etk acknolwedged this with a flick of a forelimb. “The Stardancer?”

“Out of sight.”

“Keep it that way. We don’t want the Rogue to have any warning of our approach. She might still have a few tricks. Lorn,” he said, turning to the engineer, “can we reliably contact the Rainbow Destroyer?”

“Hard to say, Commander. We don’t know what Nelan has set up as a receiver.”

“Try. Get as much information from him as you can, without risking alerting the Stardancer. I’d rather go in blind than give them advance warning.”

The tahl turned to stare at him. “Commander, you can’t send half of the Empire’s fleet in blind – ”

“I won’t send half of the Empire’s fleet against the Rogue if she has time to react,” he countered. “Lorn, get what data you can. Everyone else… be ready for battle. We’ll have backup within the crest cycle, and we’ll need to be ready to use it right away.”


	23. Execution

The ship proximity alarm went off. Something was approaching. We’d been expecting it for days. At least I figured it was days. Tension had long ago fucked up my sleep cycle. If it was the military, we’d have no hope against them. We’d have no choice but to flee, in our wrecked ship under hastily repaired shields.

I should be happy, right? This was the plan, right? If I survived, I’d be going home.

“How long do we have?” I asked Glath. He was in his human form, sitting cross-legged on the floor across from me. We were trying to play Go Fish, but neither of us had been able to concentrate.

“About fifteen minutes your time, probably,” he said. “The Princess won’t risk a green dash until she has no choice; it’s very, very risky.”

“She’ll have no choice, though. The military would have surrounded us.”

“No doubt.”

I stood up. “I’m going to the control ring.”

“You’ll put yourself at risk if you do that. You’ll need to get back here before we start to dash, and the more people in the control ring, the harder that will be.”

“I need to make sure nobody gets a chance to see the current green dash location. I have to get there now.”

“Right.”

“Will you come with me?”

He stood up. I shook my head. “Not to the control room. Stay here and coordinate everyone. Come with me to Earth.”

He stared. Blinked. “Isn’t that incredibly dangerous?”

“As opposed to being out here, on this ship, which is way safer? We can hide and protect you, if we have to. Your choice. You have about fifteen minutes to decide.”

Then I ran for the access shaft.

* * *

I leaned back and interfaced with the Stardancer.

This would be it. This would be the time that our regency fight would come to a close. I was tired of being the Rogue Princess, the Faceless Princess, and soon, it would be over.

Soon, I would have my face and name again, and I would be Undisputed Ruler of the Out-Western Aljik empire. Or I would be dead.

Soon, my crew would be out of danger. When either myself of my sister was dead, the aljik crew would simply be absorbed into whatever Court was left standing. There was no risk of treachery if there were no other Queens or Princesses to follow. The others might have a slightly more difficult time, but I had faith in their capabilities. The human, ketestri and kohrir were capable enough to escape my sister’s grasp, should she defeat me, and the haltig and drakes could bargain their way out without problems. Soon, the danger would be over for all of us.

I knew that they would be able to bargain their way to safety, because I had a pretty good grasp of the Empire’s resources and capabilities. They were not as strong as my sister would have liked, and so far as I could tell, she didn’t know that I knew. She knew that I’d taken insurance with me when I left. She knew that the Crown Jewel of the Empire was glued to my head, hiding in plain sight amidst other jewels. She thought I was blind in her Empire because I had no spies; she thought I was powerless because I was so far out of the range necessary to control any of the Empire’s systems with the Jewel, as it was supposed to do.

I was pretty sure that she didn’t realise that I could still monitor those systems with the Jewel. Not everything. Not much, in fact. But the primary engine construction facilities of the heart planet were within my capabilities to monitor, and with that, I could easily estimate the size of her military. I knew, roughly, how many ships she had.

I knew that the massive numbers surrounding us were a significant fraction of her force. I counted. Deciding I had to be wrong, I counted again.

Half. It was approximately half of her entire army, approaching from all directions, giving us nowhere to flee. We couldn’t get around them, we couldn’t fight them. They had dropped out of blue dash several light minutes away, a faint cloud surrounding us, and they weren’t approaching yet. They were probably waiting to see what we would do. Waiting to see if I had any last tricks.

I did. If half of her force was here, that meant that less than half of her force was within reach of the heart planet. I’d set our green dash anchor point at the heart planet as soon as we’d taken our current ship, ready to make a last-ditch effort there at any time… and we wouldn’t get a better shot than this.

Nobody had ever accused me of being cautious.

I unlinked from the Stardancer and opened my eyes. I looked at my control ring crew. I knew enough of the ship’s interspecies language to get by, but not enough to give complex orders. “Where is my interpreter?” I asked.

“Busy,” the human said, striding over. “He’s coordinating for evacuation. He sent me.”

“Right then. Tell the crew to prepare for a green dash.”

* * *

This was better than I’d hoped for. There wasn’t even time for the drakes to double-check our systems and notice that the anchor for the green dash had changed. The captain was sending up into a dash immediately.

I relayed the message to the nearest drake, who happened to be Kerlin. “Prepare for green dash,” I reported.

“Start the evacuation timer on my mark,” the captain ordered. “Hold...”

I relayed this, heart in my throat. My hands were almost shaking too much to give the message. This was going to work; it was actually going to work! Well, that or we’d die. But that was out of my hands. I hadn’t brought any of this danger upon us, and the captain’s plan to dump us on the doorstep of the Queen would just get everyone killed. With my plan, we had a chance. And I’d get to go home.

Oh, yeah! I was a fucking genius!

“Hold...”

If the shielding held up, this would actually work! The crew would be safe, I could commandeer an escape pod (which should be easy if I could convince Glath to come with me), and then…

And then…

The very probable future stretched out before me, all of the pieces fitting neatly into place. I hadn’t thought much about what would happen after that. Getting home had been my goal ever since I’d awoken on the Stardancer. But…

Fuck.

Fuck.

I’d fucked up.

I’d fucked up really, really badly.

“Mark!”

And there wasn’t time to fix it. I made sure I was standing between the captain and Kerlin, blocking his view, but I needn’t have bothered; he wasn’t looking at her. I kept my back to the captain so she wouldn’t be able to interpret any part of my message.

“Change of plans,” I told Kerlin hurriedly. “Get us to the nearest planet we can breathe on, however you can!”

“How?!”

“I don’t know, I’m just the messenger! Think of something!”

A brief discussion between drakes, too fast for me to follow. The captain tapped my arm to get my attention. “What’s happening,” she demanded.

“A brief complication with the dash function,” I lied hastily. “They’re fixing it.”

“Will it work?”

“Yes.”

“Then initiate as quickly as possible!”

“They are!”

The evacuation alarm went off. The captain and drakes dashed for the access shaft and escape pods. All except Kerlin, who remained at the computer, furiously inputting data.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Saving everyone! Get to safety!”

“I’m not leav – ”

“You can’t help! Go!”

I went.

The journey through the shaft felt like forever. I wasn’t actually sure, I realised, how long a delay we had to get to the shielded part of the ship. I pulled myself down the corridor, dragged the airlock door open, pulled my way through. There was no pressure differential to deal with, so getting through the airlock was a pretty quick process, and once the inner door was shut behind me, I was safe.

Well, possibly safe. If the shielding held.

The ‘safe’ part of the ship was pretty cramped. A lot of people who could have stayed in their environmental rings had instead elected to hang out in the central corridor, possibly working under the logic that the more hull between them and space, the better. Or possibly trying to get into escape pods, most of which were full. Glath came out of nowhere, grabbed me and pulled me into an escape pod.

“I saved you a seat,” he said, slamming the door closed (there was only really room for the two of us). He settled behind the controls, human fingers settling over controls not designed for them. We sat as best we could into ‘seats’ designed for body shapes I wasn’t familiar with. None of the safety harnesses would safely secure a human.

“You’re going to have to point us to the right country, when we’re close enough to Earth to tell,” Glath said.

I shook my head. “Change of plans, Glath. I couldn’t – ”

The world changed.

I wish I could say I felt pain, or nausea, or something. Those are coherent sensations. What I actually felt, nearest that I can remember, was… noise. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t something that my nervous system was equipped to deal with. Every thought and sensation was simply nonsense, a garbled static, until the universe came back, and we were somewhere else.

Escape pods, unlike the ship proper, have windows. I could see the green haze that covered us and what was left of the Stardancer. Tyzyth had been a little conservative in his estimates; some of the ship beyond our newly installed airlock had survived. But not much of it. Even under the shield, the hull was scorched and probably cracked in places. A warning light in our escape pod told me that the pressure was dropping, very slowly; we had a tiny leak somewhere. I had no idea how to find it.

Glath had scattered all around me. He reassembled into a vague, shaky human figure and said, “Where are w – ?”

Then the universe changed again.

I recognised this sensation as a more familiar blue dash. I barely recognised it, because while blue dashes are pretty uncomfortable, I’d never felt one quite so uncomfortable. The blue haze over us was rippled and uneven, and it felt like my intestines were trying to trade places with my skin.

It faded. We were somewhere else. Was it my imagination, or did the ship look to be in worse repair?

I needed a moment to get my bearings. I didn’t have a moment. The docking clamps holding our escape pod to the ship released; we dropped free into open space. Around me, I saw other escape pods releasing. Something white exploded from the ship; the ketestri, tearing its way free of the ruined hull and heading for the safety of open space. Bits fell off the ship, engines and loose bits of shielding and even an entire environmental ring being shaken free.

Glath was quicker on the uptake than I was. His hands were already back on the controls. “Planet,” he said, pointing. He fired up our engines and headed for the little rock barely visible against the harsh star behind it.

“How did you even see that?” I mumbled. “Your eyesight is the worst.” I started fumbling around for something I could use to find the leak in the cabin. Something I could turn into light powder. Worst-case scenario, I was wearing most of my space suit and had my helmet with me – I brought it everywhere, having ended up in space unexpectedly enough to highlight the importance of this habit – but Glath didn’t have one. Ambassadors, so far as I can tell, don’t do well in confined, isolated atmospheres; even the confined space of the escape pod was making it hard for him to hold his shape. If the pressure dropped too much, he might die. There was a reserve tank we could repressurise the cabin from, but resources were limited.

Behind us, the sorry remains of the Stardancer slowly, painfully dragged itself around in a limping hairpin turn. Then its blue shield flickered unsteadily into place once again, and it vanished.

The planet approached ahead, growing in size just fast enough to notice, then faster and faster. It seemed to be above us. We had gravity in the escape pod, a little stronger than I was used to back on Earth, so from my point of view it was like a giant rock was being dropped on us.

The sky was falling.

It took me a moment to realise that we weren’t supposed to have gravity and figure out what was going on. Glath was accellerating constantly, the inertia pushing us down, heading for the planet faster and faster, meaning that when he hit the halfway point…

“Hold onto something,” he said.

There was a metal hook of some kind jutting out of the ‘floor’. I gripped it with both hands. Glath killed the engines, and I took advantage of the weightlessness to flip upside down. Then Glath fired the engines up again, this time slowing us; ‘gravity’ reversed, I landed heavily on my feet, and we were falling toward the planet’s surface, dropping from an impossible height onto a flying rock that stood between us and an enormous, ancient nuclear explosion.

All in all it was pretty sedate, after the stress of fleeing the military.

It wasn’t a freefall; the decelleration pressed me to the ‘floor’ with slightly more force than Earth gravity, making the whole experience feel sort of surreal. It took a long time, too. Once the pressure drop started to feel uncomfortable, I turned on the reserve air tank to compensate. Beneath us, the planet expanded, filling our whole view. Glath angled the ship so that we could see the horizon; I put my helmet on and tried to figure out some way to use the pod’s safety harnessing to secure my odd little human body. There were other escape pods around us, all heading for the planet’s surface. There was some adjusting as we all tried to aim for the same general area.

Then we hit the atmosphere.

The ship started to get warm. Other than that, we were fine for a little while... until we hit an invisible wall that bumped us like a little kid kicking a soccer ball. Turbulence. We spun; I grabbed at a harness strap to prevent myself from being thrown into a wall. Around me, Glath lost his shape, then quickly found it again.

“We have to get stable!” I shouted. “We won’t be able to keep using the rockets to slow down if we spin – ” I stopped shouting, realising that Glath couldn’t hear be through my damn helmet.

He was on it, anyway. He tried to angle our rockets to counter the spin, but turbulence rocked us back and forth, bouncing us unpredictably.

“Parachute?” I asked in engineer’s sign, when he had a second spare to glance at me.

“Too high,” he replied with one hand. “Besides, we’ll roll in it and tangle – ”

We hit more turbulence, and I suddenly found that little hairline crack that had caused our pressure problem.

At least, I assumed that was the red-hot line in our side that suddenly tore open and spread into a gaping hole, a jagged section of the side of the ship tearing away. It yanked me towards the exit, but I was holding tight to a harnessing strap. Glath was less lucky; he flew straight for the hole. I reached out, gripped his arms, pulled him back. My friend dissolved around me, tiny spiders streaming out of the side of the ship in a long, faint dark banner. There was nobody to man to controls.

Nobody but me.

All that was left of Glath was a single hand, still gripping mine tight. I pulled it to my chest, trying to shield it from the rushing wind as I put my other hand to the controls. I knew all the basics; I couldn’t make the ship do anything fancy, but I knew how to aim the rockets, deploy chutes, that kind of thing. It would have to be enough.

I didn’t bother trying to fight the planet’s gravity with the rockets, not while the ship was spinning and rocking. I did what I could instead to stabilise the ship, countering any spin and trying to keep the descent smooth. This would have been pretty difficult even if the ship was still a round ball; the huge gaping hole in one side didn’t make things any easier. But the planet was rushing closer, and I had no choice but to try. When the planet seemed too close to let me waste any more time fucking around, I deployed the ship’s parachute and prayed to whatever force out there had kept me alive this long.

The immediate result of this was, of course, me slamming forward into the front of the ship and cracking my helmet open on the control panel. I was lucky not to break my neck. I must have blacked out for a moment, because when I looked back, the planet was closer. Half of my vision was gone, too; my left eye had stopped working again.

And then I hit the ground.

* * *

Lying face-down in the irregularly shaped wreckage of an escape pod isn’t very comfortable when you have a giant plastic bubble on your head. As a big chip was missing from the side of my cracked helmet anyway, I took it off.

I stood up, slowly, shakily. All of my bones seemed to be in the right spots; at least, the ones I was currently using. I was dizzy as fuck and my left eye wasn’t working, but I would breathe the air and move around, at least.

Well, the air hadn’t killed me yet. I guess time would tell if that would remain the case or not.

There were several tears in my space suit, and in the flesh underneath. The flesh would heal. I wasn’t sure how to fix the space suit without the ketestri around. Beneath me was a little pile of spiders; they held the shape of a human hand at first, but it crumbled when I disturbed it. The spiders lay stiff, not reacting to my prodding. I had no idea how to tell if they were dead or not. I’d seen Glath lose spiders before, and they simply remained motionless until he picked them up again – but how would that work when he was… when there was no more…

I pushed the idea away for the moment. Time to grieve later. Work to do first.

I swept up the spiders onto a detached fragment of broken hull and carried my friend out of the wreckage, into the sunrise.

The planet…

Was a planet.

It’s difficult to communicate the difference between being in space, and being on a planet. There’s something comforting about real gravity holding a real atmosphere around you, rather than trying to simulate it by cowering inside a spinning pressure tank. The limitations of life on a planet fit so much more neatly into human psychological understanding of physics than the actual simpler physics of space. With the simple act of putting my feet to dirt, the large rock that we had viewed from our pod was an entire world, a separate sort of universe than the infinite void around it; the void was irrelevant again. The hot, soulless fusion of a nearby star was a sunset, half-blocked by the vast size of the (incalculably smaller) rock I was standing on.

Admittedly, it was still pretty weird. The air pressure, while higher than an aljik atmosphere, was lower than I’d like, as was the gravity. Light moved in strange ways; it didn’t bend as much as on Earth, and the shadows cast by the oddly coloured sunset were harsh. There was life creeping along the sand under my feet, but it could hardly be likened to plant life; something purple and veiny that looked sort of like bared grass roots if you squinted at it, but perfectly at home on the surface with no stalks or leaves. And it divided… oddly, spread out more like a net than like roots.

But it was a planet, and when I stepped out onto it, life suddenly made more sense than it had since I woke up for the first time on the Stardancer.

Which made everything that had happened on the Stardancer seem, in contrast, really fucking insane.

Another escape ship had crashed nearby. Over the flat, treeless plain, it was clearly visible. A lucky break, when you consider the size of an entire planet. With no other clear goal in sight, I started walking over to it.

The figure that clambered out and headed for me was a drake. I squinted, trying to get a better look in the dimming light. We’d closed about half the distance between each other before I got a good enough look to recognise him – Kerlin! Kerlin had survived! I broke into an excited run, which sent rippled of agony up my legs and forced me back to a walking pace.

“You’re alive!” Kerlin exclaimed in relief when we were close enough to talk.

“You’re alive!” I said back. “I thought you wouldn’t make it. There wasn’t much time for you to get out of the control ring.”

“I’m pretty quick,” he said dismissively. “Are you hurt?”

“Probably. Hard to tell. Glath is...” I gestured to my pile of spiders.

“He… he was a good dohl,” Kerlin mumbled.

“He was a good person,” I said quietly.

We looked at Glath, then up at the sky.

“What did you do with the Stardancer?” I asked.

“I preset it to green dash close enough that it could blue dash to this planet, had it eject the escape pods, and then blue dash back to the green dash anchor,” he said. “Anyone who couldn’t make it to an escape pod would… well, I couldn’t save everyone, but...”

“But they’re going to follow the trail of the green dash, and what they’ll find is a trashed ship with failed shielding and probably nobody left alive,” I said, impressed. “They have no way of knowing you got a couple of blue dashes out of it to dump us here. You faked all our deaths. Clever.”

“It seemed like something that Riker would do,” Kerlin said, with a modest wing-flick.

“So,” I said. “What now?”

“Don’t ask me. This was your plan. We should find a way to stay alive and search for other survivors, I suppose.”

“They could be anywhere on the whole damn planet,” I pointed out.

“Then we should get started.”

We walked in silence for awhile.

Eventually, Kerlin said, “What made you change your mind?”

“What do you mean?”

“In there, with the dash. What made you send us here instead?”

“I was just interpreting the captain’s orders,” I said. “She’s the one who – ”

“I had to alter the green dash anchor to get us here, Charlie. I saw where it was located.”

Oh.

I wanted to tell him the truth. Really I did. I wanted to explain the logic, the thought process, impress upon him the importance of the change of plan… but we didn’t have the shared vocabulary for it.

So instead I said, “I couldn’t put the crew in that kind of danger, dragging them with me so close to Earth.”

He accepted that.

It was bullshit, of course; humans were no danger to the crew of the Stardancer so long as the crew didn’t physically land on our planet. We walked across the flat, sandy, rootbound ground, the sunset turning the world into a pattern of red highlights and black shadows, and I wondered if there was a way I could explain better. Our shared language had been growing over time; we could tell stories in it now. So surely there was a way for me to explain the future I had seen, standing there in the control ring of the Stardancer?

Surely I could find a way to explain that the moment humanity picked up the existence of the Stardancer hanging around our solar system (and a whrecked ship, even as small as it was, would definitely leave traces to be picked up eventually), real evidence of real intelligent life out there, that the entire planet would celebrate. That the world would pour itself into space exploration, into sending probes and people out to greet our cousins; that half the world would fear invasion and the other half would hope for diplomacy and trade and that we would head out, completely unaware of our reputation, completely unaware of the danger, to interact with the Empire. The Jupiterians at first, probably, who were so obsessed with us that they kept getting caught trying to interact even though doing so had nearly gotten them all slaughtered by the Empire, and then, with technology from them, further beyond…

There had to be a way to explain the excitement that would overtake us. The confusion and anger, when a panicked Empire showed up to eliminate us, the impossible threat, the boogey men who had necessitated the building of the Empire in the first place. That our response to our ships being wiped out on sight would be less than positive, that the retribution we would demand would far outweigh the initial deaths.

And maybe, after the war, it would settle down. It often did, when human culture met human culture in this way. But our entry onto the interstellar community would be a bloody one, and our future would be forever marked by that. Even after settling, after peace is made, those marks stain a relationship between cultures forever.

Not this one. We’d fucked up a lot of first contact scenarios. But humans were going to go into space clean. Our legacy would be one of peace and curiosity and discovery and communication. Not war and fear and defensiveness. Fuck that.

How could I explain to this drake how important that was? How could I explain to him that the future depended on us being the best we could be, rather than what we were, and on the Empire being the same? We weren’t ready to meet the Empire… but more significantly, the Empire wasn’t ready to meet us. They wouldn’t be, for as long as humans held their current reputation. For as long as the members of the Empire couldn’t properly respect and deal with other species. For as long as fear and violence and dismissal took a back seat to respect and communication and mutual benefit. And if that work had to be done before humans could join the galaxy at large, and there was no reason for the necessity of it to occur to anybody else…

Well, you know what they say about what to do if you want a job done properly.

No, I didn’t have the words to explain all that, and Kerlin didn’t have the context. Not yet. Besides, right at that moment, we had more practical survival concerns to contend with. The grand future of the galaxy was out of our hands if we died trapped on this planet.

So we – human, giant winged goanna, and an armful of probably-dead spiders – strode across the alien landscape, the last dregs of sunset behind us and unknown land ahead, to get to the grim, dreary work of building a future.


End file.
